Photo: my own.
Most of contemporary life looks to reason and calculation, to the quantifiable and meritorious. When weighty decisions loom, we divide our thinking into pros and cons, consider impact and probability.
We are products, still, of the Age of Enlightenment. And with good reason (pun intended). Humanistic inquiry and critical thinking produce well-rounded, informed perspectives—in life, leadership, and I might say, sometimes, in love.
To really understand something, or someone, means exploring, interrogating, and appreciating the myriad dimensions of a subject, or self. Complex beings we are, and complex is our history. Too often, today, the patina of complexity is splashed by the garish paint of reductionism and presentism—two, ugly -isms that insist upon right/wrong, thumbs up/down, “with me/not with me” thinking.
Over the past five or so years I’ve tried to wean myself from the strident and binary, though it’s easy to fall back into these modes, and I am not always successful at ‘seeing’ my self. Inquiry, critical thinking, and equanimity were primary drivers in my returning to school to study the Liberal Arts. I enjoyed the range of subjects, the history of accrued knowledge, and the prism of viewpoints from students with backgrounds and cultures different than my own.
I also appreciate ways of knowing that can’t be articulated in essays, or organized by rows and columns in an Excel spreadsheet. Intuition is one example.
Intuition speaks not from the bright light of certainty but from the shadows of uncertainty. It’s a language without words, numbers, or sound: a chord of suspended judgment that vibrates through watching and waiting. Intuition draws us into eddies of non-knowing—an interesting place to swim, and not altogether unpleasant. At least for a time.
The English poet John Keats referred to interior voice as Negative Capability—the ability to be content amid doubt, mystery, and half-knowledge. Keats prized intuition over reason for artistic reasons. Letting our imaginations run, throwing flowers and blowing bubbles around reason, produces the rich substance and textured planes that are later molded by logic and polished by purpose.
Negative Capability is hard to attain, I think. It seems best approached from the side, by accident or happenstance. I think back to the days when I worked after school shelving books at the local library: the progression of clocks, the slow advancement of the book cart down carpeted aisles, the hushed tones of patrons. Often I emerged from the library far more evenly keeled than when I arrived, fraught and addled by schoolwork, drama, and petty grievances. Shelving books was kind of meditation, a portal to heightened Intuition—after which some of my best “thinking” was done.
Truth be told, Intuition, even my own, makes me uneasy. It sings and seduces with breezy curtains and dancing shadows. While I’ve grown more comfortable with not knowing in a concrete sense, sometimes I wonder at the result. Take this little journal post: I intended to write about something else entirely (a recent trip to South Carolina), but found myself pulled like an uncalibrated steering wheel toward this topic. Why? To what end? No idea.
Perhaps one can listen too much to Intuition, for too long. Perhaps some cold water and a little recalibration are in order. And so, I reason: Finding myself writing about Intuition, I deduce she is actually writing to me … letting me know with a gentle hand that she’s stepping aside to let reason and logic take the wheel for awhile.
Not for too long, I hope.
I do like Intuition’s company and am almost always better for it.