Intuition leads us to make good decisions, but we don’t always notice what’s happening.
Maybe it comes from trial and error: You do it once, it makes life easy, so you’re more likely to do it again. And maybe you don’t notice.
You might find yourself writing functions without side effects well before you learn about purity. You don’t need to understand why they’re simpler to benefit from that fact, and thus you might easily stumble into the habit on your own.
Similar: You might find yourself bobbing your newborn to calm her without being told that it commonly helps. And without further being told why it tends to help. Again, you don’t need to know the why to get the benefits. With a crying baby on hand, you’ll try stuff until something works. You’ll stumble onto that, and it’ll become one of the first things you try, pretty quickly.
There’s a lot we know but don’t come to via reason. When we recognize it, we can start to understand it. We can share it. And we can build on it.
I talk a lot about awareness and mindfulness, I know. That’s because they can be the root of a lot of really positive stuff. Knowing ourselves isn’t a prerequisite for bettering ourselves, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier.
