Why Does Intuition Want to Spoil My Wonderfully Logical Plans?











Let's say you want to be a rich and famous novelist.

You have it all planned out:

1. get a writing job at the local newspaper;
2. come up with a brilliant story idea;
3. write novel;
4. find an agent who gets your book published;
5. tour the country for signings;
6. have novel made into blockbuster movie;
7. win Nobel Prize for literature;
8. retire to the South of France.

You get step one and two checked off. Great!

Then one balmy Tuesday in October comes along. Your "Intuition?" tells you to call in sick and enjoy some golf. You call your friend Alfie and meet him at the North Fork Country Club. Your boss runs into you at the 19th hole and you get fired from your terrific job at the Suffolk Times.

Back to step zero.

Now, the only lousy work you can find is scraping barnacles off boat bottoms at the Greenport Yacht and Shipbuilding Company. You get depressed as the weeks drag by.

Then you start noticing that the strange characters who work with you each have their interesting quirks and histories. Your novel starts to percolate. You can't wait to get home each night and type away. And Danny, the old man who's been painting the names on yachts, his daughter is a top literary agent. You meet her at her Danny's retirement party and she takes interest in your writing.

Your logical mind says, "Well, why didn't you tell me that we were supposed to write about the characters in the shipyard? And that you were planning to meet an agent through one of them?"

"Why?"

Well, your intuition isn't interested in wasting time talking to your logical mind. It speaks a different language. I haven't figured out if its Medieval French or Pre-Cyrillic Russian, but I know it's something I can't translate just yet.

Besides, your intuition only deals with the next step. It only will tell you the next thing to do.

This is important, this is why I actually wrote this entry. Your intuition only deals with the next step. It will only tell you the very next thing to do and will sometimes wait years until you do it.

It won't not nag and hound you like your mother did when you were 14, to clean up your room. It will just whisper. Sometimes just once and if you don't listen, you miss out, you file the thought away, you forget about it. Or if you keep pestering your inner feelings instead of taking the next small step, you might get to hear the wrong answer you wanted to hear all along.

If you want to hear your intuition, you need to blindly take the step it is telling you. Afterwards, you may stumble into what to do after that, or your intuition may speak to you again.

I like to think of life as a maze. Your logical mind tells you that you want to go a certain way. It knows the cheese you want is to the north. But you will sometimes will have to go east or southwest as you follow the maze path. You have to if you want to eventually get to your goal, your cheese at the end of the maze.

It can be frustrating, your mind is shouting "the cheese is thataway" and your gut is yelling, "I don't care, this is the next step in the maze." They can sound be like two brothers, 8 and 9, fighting over that last jelly doughnut.

And it takes courage - what if your gut feeling is wrong?

At one point in my life, I studied from Stuart Wilde. He said that, "Your logical thinking isn't right all the time, so don't expect you intuition to be either." You will make some mistakes. When you follow you intuition, do your taxes, or paint the name on a boat, you will make mastakes.

It will take practice and mistakes to know when it really is your intuition speaking.

I don't like writing articles like this for one reason. Too much theory, too much thinking. All the words in 180 books can matter less than one bumbling, tiny attempt to do something. My gentle reader, just make some small, clumsy attempt to do what your gut is saying and I will feel today's writing was worth it.

(Oh, man! I was going to have oatmeal for breakfast. Now that I wrote about jelly doughnuts, It ain't gonna happen.)