A friend points out a tree on your street. You've walked past this tree for ten years. Today you actually see it. The shape. The way the bark crinkles. The particular green. You didn't see it before because thought had already classified it as "tree on the street I walk past." Today, for some reason, the classification failed and the thing itself came through.
K argued that thought, being memory, can only meet the present by matching it to the past. If something fits a known category, thought files it and moves on. The category doing the filing was built earlier — yesterday, last decade. Whatever doesn't fit the category is invisible to thought. Not less interesting. Invisible.
Every moment contains things thought has names for and things it doesn't. Thought sees the first. The second slip past. The "new" isn't a rare event reserved for breakthroughs. It's available every moment. Just outside the part of perception that thought has captured. The instant thought says "tree," the actual tree is gone again.
You can feel the difference between thought-seeing and direct-seeing. Thought-seeing is comfortable. Familiar. Predictable. Direct-seeing has a quality of strangeness. Even a thing you've known forever, seen directly, looks slightly off. Not wrong. Just unprocessed. The strangeness is the new arriving.
Thought built its categories yesterday. It uses them today to filter what gets in. The new is everything thought has no category for. Most of life is the new, going unseen, while thought congratulates itself on recognizing what it already filed.