Descending through the silvery rows of olive trees that evening, a trail of dust billowing up behind him, Pablo discovered Victor sitting outside. On the table in front of him was a plate of cheese, a half-eaten barra, and an open bottle of rioja.
“Hello there!” he said, greeting Pablo with a familiar smile and closing a book he’d been reading.
“¡Buenas!” responded Pablo, taking off his helmet.
“What brings you this way this time of day?” asked Victor cheerfully.
“I have to talk to you.”
“All right then, but first things first. Coffee? Tea? What would you like?”
“Could I just have some wine?”
“Oh, of course! Maybe I’ve already had too much myself! Let me go get a glass.”
A small flock of swallows circled noisily overhead, corralling its insect prey in midair, each of the birds partaking of their last meal of the day, as though they, too, were guests at Victor’s table.
The old man returned and poured Pablo some wine. As he did, Pablo indulged in a quick bite, one hand concealing a mouthful of rich, semicured manchego while he told Victor about the opportunity in Barcelona. Misgivings momentarily upstaged by possibilities, he quickly tapped back into the excitement of that morning.
“That sounds wonderful!” Victor exclaimed, as though it were a done deal.
“Do you think so? I think I want to do it—but I’m not sure.”
“Not sure about what?”
“My mom. The store. You know, the things we talked about the other day. Barcelona, too. Especially Barcelona, actually. On the one hand, it sounds so exciting. On the other, it’s really daunting. What if I don’t like the job? Juan says it’s brutal. And what if I get all the way up there and don’t even like living in the city?”
“A lot of what-ifs! But aren’t you overlooking the most important question?”
Victor’s words hung heavy in the air, somewhere between invitation and challenge.
“What do you mean?”
“Come now,” Victor admonished. “You know exactly what I’m getting at. You’re still talking about what you think. What’s your heart telling you? What do you feel?”
Pablo hesitated, as though he’d been avoiding asking himself that very question, not to mention naively hoping Victor, too, would fail to bring it up.
“Rather than falling into the all-too-familiar trap of letting your doubts and fears sabotage the opportunity, approach the situation one step at a time,” Victor reminded him. “Problems and possibilities are similar in that there’s no point in doing much about either until they materialize. The only thing that matters now is how you feel about going—or at least applying for the job, which you may not even get. As such, there’s only one question left to ask yourself.”
“What’s my intuition telling me?”
“Ha! I’d say we’re well beyond that!” Victor retorted, not about to let Pablo so easily off the hook. “You could hardly contain yourself when you told me the news. The question is whether or not you believe it.”
“Believe it?”
Pablo was thrown.
“Yes, believe it. When you felt your initial experiences were of little consequence, I suggested your inner voice might eventually come to bear upon circumstances that wouldn’t seem so trivial. Now it is. But the role you allow it to play depends on how much trust you’ve built up in it. Maybe you’re not there yet. Maybe you’re not ready to make important decisions based on what you feel. It’s not easy to let go of a lifelong reliance on reason alone! These things take time. Either way, I suspect that’s what’s truly at the root of your hesitation.”
Victor was right, thought Pablo. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard his inner voice. It was that he’d been afraid to trust it, instead dwelling on the unknowns. In his defense, though, it was only natural he might hesitate to trust something he had yet to fully understand, something he was still at a loss to explain.
“But what is it? I mean, what is it really?” he asked.
“It?” replied Victor.
“Yeah, intuition. Even though we’ve talked so much about it, I can’t really say. But at the same time, it feels so natural—which makes it even weirder.”
“You’re right. It is in fact both entirely natural and undeniably mysterious,” Victor reassured him with a knowing smile. “As for your question, as for what it is, that’s something that can be approached any number of ways. I suspect you could find as many answers as you could people to ask. You, for example, you equated intuition with knowing something was going to happen, right? Something akin to a premonition?”
“I guess so. I didn’t really know how to define it.”
Victor took out a match from a box on the table and lit a couple of candles, the air momentarily charged with phosphorous.
“Intuēri,” he said cryptically, as the flames began to give off a gentle glow.
“¿Cómo?” wondered Pablo, not certain he had heard correctly.
“Intuēri,” Victor repeated, this time more deliberately. “‘To look at,’ in Latin. That’s the root of intuition, which seems as good a place to begin as any if we want to get to the bottom of what it is.”
“To look at,” echoed Pablo thoughtfully.
“If we were to go a step further and look in the dictionary,” Victor continued, “we’d find lots of other definitions as well. Anything from ‘knowing’ or ‘sensing without the use of reason’ to other concepts such as ‘idea,’ ‘instinct,’ ‘sixth sense,’ and on and on.”
“So which one is right?”
“Which one?” Victor shot back with a laugh. “They all are, of course!”
“What?” Pablo objected, dismayed. “How can they all be right?”
“Because there isn’t a single contradiction on the list,” Victor replied, encouraging Pablo to see his point. “They’re all just different facets of the same phenomenon, light refracted through the same jewel.”
“I don’t get it,” Pablo protested. “An idea is not the same thing as your sixth sense. I mean, what is intuition exactly?”
Two bats, apparently having taken over for the swallows, as though some sort of aerial changing of the guard had taken place, darted along unpredictable, jagged paths overhead. At times they came so close to the table their wing beats were audible, like miniature helicopters erratically chopping through the air.
“I suppose if you want to go beyond dictionary definitions,” Victor began, as though reluctantly preparing to indulge his young friend and take things to a whole different level, “you have to leave behind the dictionary.”
“OK. I guess. But what does that mean?” Pablo still didn’t follow.
“It means that, ultimately, intuition is not something that can be simply and succinctly summarized with words, no matter how eloquent or articulate one might be. The Sufis—remember, the holy men in the cave—they believed, as in fact Sufis still do today, that many of life’s mysteries had to be experienced firsthand in order to be truly understood, as opposed to merely transmitted intellectually, be it through a book, a lesson, or what have you—though any and all of those might be helpful. The same is true for intuition. Although we can talk about it, and although—as the Sufis also believe—it can certainly be of help to have someone with more understanding help you find the way, in the end, it’s something that has to be experienced personally.”
Pablo took another drink of wine, letting Victor’s words sink in. He then asked, “If you can’t even really explain it, how do you know it’s real?”
“I’m sure many people would say you don’t!” Victor readily allowed, a mischievous, even provocative, twinkle in his eye. “Which, no doubt, goes a long way toward explaining why so many people disregard their inner voices—never mind their feelings in general. We live, after all, in an age of reason, one in which science—though I’m neither a luddite nor foolish enough to suggest it doesn’t have its place—science has spoiled us. It’s deceived us, really, with the expectation that everything has a logical explanation that can definitively lay to rest any and all questions. By extension, anything that cannot be readily explained rationally is inherently suspect. Any claims it might have to any basis in reality are tenuous at best, if not entirely illegitimate. Indeed, if permitted to do so, science would single-mindedly claim a monopoly on the foundation of our beliefs, of what we consider real. Yet, inside ourselves, even in this glorious, triumphant age of reason, with all its advances and changes and pomp and circumstance, we’re still not convinced.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because if we were, we wouldn’t continue to look elsewhere for answers.”
“Answers to what?”
“To life’s fundamental questions! We continue to look anywhere and everywhere we think we might find them. Indeed, we don’t have to venture far to discover all sorts of belief systems that, although they have little or no apparent basis in reason, nonetheless serve as potential alternatives for the answers we seek.”
“I get it,” said Pablo, now clear where Victor was headed. “You mean like religion.”
“Certainly not the only one, but undeniably a rather striking example.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely. What better example of something that can’t be explained in rational terms, yet in which millions upon millions of people profess a blind—yet incredibly powerful—faith? No doubt as to the reality of something that cannot be proven logically? Something that, despite what many would consider that rather notable shortcoming, plays a very real, active role in their day-to-day lives, shaping their beliefs, affecting their decisions, charting their paths forward. Religion not only persists, but in many places it prospers, growing right alongside science, unthreatened by something that would seem such a menacing contradiction. How would that be possible if we truly believed science had all the answers, that we no longer had any need to look for them elsewhere? No, if we were convinced it did, religion would be dead.”
Presented with such a monumental statement, one that felt almost sacrilegious, despite arguably being more akin to a defense of the divine than an indictment of it, Pablo needed a minute to sit with it, to let its ramifications sink in.
“So how does all that relate to my intuition?” he asked, after helping himself to another piece of cheese.
“In just about every way, I’d say!” Victor insisted. “In a nutshell, though, perhaps you can see that our inability to explain something rationally doesn’t necessarily mean it has no basis in reality. Perhaps it does, but we haven’t figured it out yet. Perhaps it’s beyond reason altogether. In either case, in the absence of reason, we have the experience itself—what we observe and what we feel—to attest at least on some level to its authenticity, just as you’ve seen with your intuition.”