I have a very important thing in common with Perseus. No, not that I’m a celebrated demigod hero, though I’ll forgive you for assuming so. What we share is that I once flatly refused to see Medusae, the Latin plural of Medusa, and also a kind of freshwater jellyfish.
I encountered them while boating on Twin Lake. I don’t remember the exact year, but some friends and I were out on a pontoon boat, fishing, drinking beer, and generally engaged in juvenile rowdyism. At some point we noticed the water was full of small, white, drifting shapes. We tried to guess what they were, and even though they were very obviously jellyfish, we had no idea. We guessed everything. Seeds? Something decaying and breaking apart? Some kind of algae bloom?
We could see them perfectly well in the physical sense. We just couldn’t conceive of jellyfish living and thriving in freshwater, because we all “knew” that jellyfish live only in the ocean.
What stuck with me afterward wasn’t that I was stupid. I’m a reasonably intelligent person, and that didn’t help me at all. My mind was so hung up on what I “knew” to be true that I couldn’t even perceive the clear evidence directly in front of my eyes. We all do it too, constantly, without noticing. I didn’t leave that lake any smarter. I left it a little more aware that I’m often not really seeing, and that seeing clearly takes a deliberate effort: allowing uncomfortable uncertainty to creep in so that we can really objectively observe. I think that small, on-purpose humility is where paying attention actually begins.
As a final note: you, dear reader, may be thinking, “No way, there’s no such thing as freshwater jellyfish.” To which I say, here, let me show you. (Craspedacusta sowerbii. Go ahead and look it up.) What’s that in the water? Freshwater jellyfish.