A child can watch a bee for twenty minutes. Adults manage three seconds.

My three-year-old spent twenty-two minutes watching a bee last Saturday. I know because I timed it — not to measure him, but because I was curious how long the attention would hold. He crouched on the path beside the lavender, close enough to feel the air from the wings, and he watched. He didn't speak. He didn't reach for me. He was, as far as I could tell, entirely satisfied.

This is edition 170. Which means we've been doing this for a while, and the number that comes back to me today — World Bee Day — is the one I started with: twenty-two minutes.

Children have something we spend adult life trying to recover: the capacity for undivided attention to something that offers them nothing in return.

The bee was not performing. It was doing what bees do — assessing flower quality, loading pollen, executing the waggle dance geometry that communicates distance and direction to the hive. It had no idea it was being watched. It certainly had no idea it was holding a child's attention for twenty-two minutes on a Saturday morning in May.

The research on childhood attention is complicated by the fact that children's attention looks, to adults, like restlessness. They move. They shift. They seem not to be concentrating. What's actually happening is that they're often concentrating on more things simultaneously — processing more of the perceptual field — a different cognitive mode from the focused single-channel attention we train in school.

But with something genuinely interesting — a bee, a snail, a spider, a flame — children attend with a quality most adults have lost. The psychologist Csikszentmihalyi called it flow: complete absorption in an activity, where time distorts and self-consciousness disappears. Children enter this state more easily than adults. The question is whether we give them things worth entering it for.