Everyday Canvas

Intuition

Prompt: What do you think intuition is, and have you had examples of intuition in your life you’re willing to write about?

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Intuition can be thought of as some mystical prowess or a matter of lucky guesswork. Although there are some scientific studies on intuition’s being a very real ability, I think intuition is something like a gut feeling, possibly based on some forgotten past experience. This is because our brains are processing information even when we are not aware of them doing that. For the same reason, when we sleep on a problem, sometimes a solution becomes evident to us when we wake up. Still, for the same reason, some dreams guide us to solutions. Remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s claim to writing his novels after dreaming about them?

I’ve had many instances of intuition in my life. Sometimes, I could reason out their sources, and at other times, I can’t even point to an inkling of them, but in some strange form or problem-solving method, I am quite sure they have originated as the result of my brain’s examining and deducing the data that might have been around me, although I might not be aware of its workings.

For example, at the end of September and the beginning of October 2016, a strong hurricane was coming at where we live. All the weathercasters were up in arms and everyone was nervous. I said the hurricane would pass by us, only touching a little bit on the coast. I was really sure of this as a gut feeling, but considering everybody’s nervousness, I still took all the safety measures for my family and house and asked a friend to take over what I do in WdC, should the hurricane really hit. Sure enough, Hurricane Matthew bypassed our area, just stealing the sand from the beaches, and caused some commotion further up in the state and made a landfall in South Carolina as a category one hurricane, while we didn't even lose electricity or the internet.

I think what happened was my mind’s assessing the situation, based on my at least 25 years of living in this state and comparing it with the information from earlier TV and other media’s hurricane reports and their hits and near misses, which my brain stored in its far corners.

There are other instances where I felt something did happen or was about to happen in some certain way and my gut feeling was right; except, some of those times, I couldn’t think of the clues that led my brain to its assessment. I am sure the clues might have been there, but I think they were just hidden from my consciousness.