Join WhatsApp Channel
I once saw a friend take forty minutes to decide what to order at a restaurant. She read the menu three times. She asked the waiter what he recommended. She asked the table what we were having. She narrowed it down to two dishes, then four, then back to two. By the time she finally ordered, she looked exhausted.
Halfway through her meal, she put down her fork and said, almost to herself, “I knew I wanted the pasta the whole time.”
I think about that moment often because it’s such a small, harmless version of something most of us do with the wider choices in our lives.
We call it confusion. But often, it isn’t.
Confusion has a particular texture. It’s loud. It’s busy. It feels like many voices talking at once — what your parents would say, what’s practical, what you’re afraid of, what other people have done, who you used to be, who you think you should be. All of them, talking over each other, in your head.
Intuition sounds nothing like that. It’s usually one voice. Quiet. It doesn’t argue or defend itself. It just says the thing, simply, often before you’ve finished asking the question.
The trouble is, intuition is often the first thing we hear and the last thing we trust. It speaks once, gently, then steps back. Confusion arrives a moment later, much louder, and convinces us that the quiet voice couldn’t possibly have been right because it didn’t show its working.
Most of us were raised to trust the loud voices—the ones with reasons, with pros and cons lists, with an air of responsibility. So, when intuition speaks in a single sentence with no footnotes, we dismiss it as just a feeling — as if feelings were unreliable, and analysis was somehow more honest.
But analysis can lie. It can be shaped by fear. It can dress up avoidance in the language of prudence. Intuition rarely lies, because it has nothing to gain from lying. It’s just telling you what it knows.
Here’s a small test. When you ask yourself a difficult question, notice what arrives in the first two seconds. That fast, almost reflexive answer — before the mind organizes itself — is usually intuition. Everything after, all the but what about and on the other hand, is usually confusion talking you out of what you already knew.
Intuition won’t hand you a five-year plan. It gives you the next step — small, specific, immediate. It trusts you to take it and find out the rest as you go.
So, the next time you feel confused, get quiet. Not to think harder. To think less. Ask the question once and notice what arrives before the noise does.
You might find you weren’t confused at all. You just hadn’t permitted yourself to trust the quiet voice that answered first.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this article/column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of South Asian Herald.
