At the end of one of his lectures, Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky recommended Chaos: Making a new science, a book by James Gleick. While reading it, the following quote struck me:
When I came into this game, there was a total absence of intuition. One had to create intuition from scratch. Intuition as it was trained by the usual tools – the hand, the pencil, and the ruler – found these shapes [fractals] quite monstrous and pathological.
The old intuition was misleading. The first pictures were to me quite a surprise; then I would recognize some pictures from previous pictures and so on.
Intuition is not something that is given. I’ve trained intuition to accept obvious shapes which were initially rejected as absurd, and I find everyone else can do the same.
James Gleick
Intuition is not something that is given. Intuition is something that must be created and then trained.
In my case, for the first six or eight weeks after the birth of our daughter, my husband was a better mother than me. Instinctively, I would feed my baby, keep her warm, clean, and safe. I would get awake at night, seconds or minutes before she would cry hunger. Intuitively… I didn’t have an innate knowledge of how to make myself calm and present. That I would have to learn.
It seemed to me that everyone else knew exactly what to do or what to say. I was drowning in rivers of well-meaning and polished words of others, and my own words were dry.
Until one day when I caught my daughter smiling at me, and somehow, that smile, that slight smile, allowed me to breathe. That smile was my fractal moment – a sudden clarity in a previously perplexing pattern. Years later, I recognized that that was the moment I was finally born as a mother.
A mother’s intuition was not something given to me by a pregnancy test or holding my daughter for the first time. Intuition is a dynamic, crafted force, growing stronger with each silent aha! moment. Because
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven