Thursday 25 September 2014

Intuition

Intuition is nothing more than taking in data points, and seeing a pattern.

My intuition kicked in ~2 years ago.  On a work telecon meeting with my teammates, I listened half-heartedly to the usual preamble of how are yous, and what has been the highlight/lowlight of the past fortnight, when suddenly my teammate mentioned that she was in hospital for a week.  I messaged her almost immediately to ask how she was, and was she better.  After she evaded giving me a straight answer after I asked what was her illness.... I said... "Did you have a miscarriage?"

She was surprised enough to start yes, and really how did I know?

The data points are (1) she is normally a bubbly, enthusiastic person (2) she sounded sad - yes it came through in her voice even though the telecon only had audio without video (3) I know she had been trying for a baby from a previous conversation.  Putting all these separate pieces of information together, I deduced that she had been pregnant, and lost the baby.
See, easy peasy.

This afternoon, I went to an alternative healer who is trained in the ancient Chinese art of bone therapy.  He asked me to lie face down, felt along my spine, and said a couple of startling things about me, things that I never expected a total stranger to know about me....

Intuition?  Tis his training in the healing arts that gave him these insights into me.  My body really was laid out before him like a map.  This spot was connected to my heart, this to my colon, this to my reproductive system.  WOW.

I suppose it only seems wow to me, because I am not trained to see what he saw.

In the age of Google where every fact can be found with a search, the art of intuition is even more crucial for excelling in one's chosen field.  A teacher leads you to the facts, education is seeing patterns when the data points are a mess to the untrained eye.