When I was young – around 11 or 12 – I recall having very strong hunches about things that would pan out. Nothing weird, simply day-to-day things. I’d lose my stamp album and then I’d go to sleep and in my dreams I’d see it was in the bottom drawer of a cupboard. And when I woke up and went to the drawer, I’d find it. I  would have very strong feelings I’d pick up from other people’s emotions. When someone said something, I’d feel the emotion from which they spoke. I’d hear anger, and overlaid on that, jealousy or envy. I’d often have a sense of what someone was going to say before they said it.

None of this was overtly alarming. It blended very easily into what I considered normal and never made me feel different. I didn’t talk about it to anyone, except my mother, who dismissed it as “just imagination.” But I always knew it wasn’t either “just” or “imagination.”

Those hunches continued until I was about 26 or so, when I pushed them aside, even actively suppressed them. That wasn’t hard to do because I’m also a very logical person. Extremely logical.

Of course, you can never suppress anything so intrinsic to your psychological make-up  without it taking revenge.  Which it did.  I began developing headaches. I’d lose things all the time. Anytime I planned something, unexpected road blocks would stop me. No matter how hard I tried, I would get bogged down or tripped up.  Even when my work was going well, I’d find it dry,  insipid, lacking the rich colors of my imaginative life in childhood.

Then the inevitable happened. I should say, several inevitables happened. Loss, illness, treachery, black mishaps and fumbles straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel. One after the other, the logical pins that held my life in place, loosened and fell. The whole thing unraveled. It was so painful that if I’d been told in advance, I think I would have opted out of living altogether.

In retrospect, the pain was a fair price. In return, my intuitions revived, more powerfully than ever, and rooted in a much firmer sense of reality. And now I realize the pain was only proportionate to my resistance to change.

Why do I bring all this up?

Because for the past few years especially, I’ve been living closer and closer to intuition, in a very raw way. Out of sheer necessity.

The necessity comes from several things.

First, my personal isolation, which arises from the circumstances of my life.

Second, it comes out of the logistics of writing about controversial things, which makes me keep to myself and distrust most people, even those who write to me sympathetically. Even friends.

The third reason is that in the past ten years I’ve had to battle things and people so much bigger than myself that the usual avenues of help – lawyers or mediators – were useless. I’ve had to fall back on myself almost completely.

Fourth, the market has been so volatile and freakish that I’ve had to abandon looking to any one analyst or system for guidance, but have to had to develop my own independent judgment.

Fifth, and maybe most important of all, combing through thousands of pieces of opinion and fact to put together my books and articles, I’ve had to become preternaturally sensitive to what I read. I’ve had to rely on my intuition to judge the motivations and meanings behind the things I read. It’s only then that I piece together things and make a call.

Others will have to be the judge of whether those calls were more accurate than most.

I can only tell you that they came from some place deeper and much bigger than me.

Note:

As an afterthought, I should add that intuition is always best when grounded in rationality. It´s not irrelevant that as a child I devoured whatever history books I could get my hands on, especially books on World War II.  And that in graduate school, I´ve written literally thousands of pages of seminar papers on contemporary politics….Nonetheless.

Training and analysis are groundwork. Synthesis and judgement do indeed need intuition.