Intuition is not a guess.
It is knowing that arrives before its reasons do.

We are trained to distrust it. To ask for the steps, the proof, the chain of reasons, as if nothing is true until it has been spelled out slowly enough for anyone to check. But the deepest knowing does not work that way. It does not assemble the case. It senses the whole shape of the answer at once, and only later, if pressed, goes looking for words to explain what it already knew.

I have learned to trust the first clear feeling over the long argument that follows it. Not the loud impulse, and not the wish, but the quiet, steady read that is there before you have had time to want anything. That signal is older than reasoning, and on the things that matter most, it is almost always right, long before you could say why.

This is not the enemy of thinking. It is what thinking is for, at its best. Not grinding through every option, but sensing directly which one fits, the way you know a true note from a false one without ever counting the frequencies. The reasons can come afterward. Reasons are how you carry a knowing to other people. They are not how you found it.

Intuition is what is left once the noise is gone. Go quiet enough, and you stop calculating and start sensing, and the answer is simply there, the way it was there all along, under everything you were doing to keep from feeling it.

Sense the answer. Do not compute it.

Curtis

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