Noticing

A friend speaks nine languages with great ease and perfect accent. It comes easily to him, and he has also played very fluent jazz trumpet since he was a teenager, though he's from a place with little tradition of it. That, too, is a learned language.

His explanation is that he's a genius. But I see the actuality of it: he has a gift for imitation, allowing him to effortlessly sound Italian or Brazilian or French, and the same gift helps him ape the sound of a jazz trumpet player. He doesn't have anything interesting to say in those languages—or on his horn. But he seamlessly recreates the superficial sound. A neat trick!

I explained this to an acquaintance, who asked a perfectly reasonable question: "How do you know all this?" Had I read a lot of psychology books? Had I extensively "examined" this guy? Did I have a shred of factual evidence for my assessment? He wasn't quite accusing me of glib bullshitting, but he certainly wasn't taking my explanation at face value. He knew the guy, too, and he hadn't reached these conclusions. 

My first impulse was to doubt myself. But I do feel certain about this, and at age 62 I have a great many data points from times where I turned out to have been provably right. This has raised my confidence, though confidence was a very long time coming. When younger, *I* was the guy asking *myself* "But how did you know this?"

I'm loathe to call it "intuition", because it's a much more educated assessment. But, no, I'm not a shrink, and I did not put him through a battery of personality tests and cranial MRIs. So how do I account for it?

I actually pay attention to things outside my own head.

People think they already do this, but watching strangers walking around, it's obvious that they're completely zonked out, enslaved to their internal monologues. "Be here now" is too much to ask in a world where "Look around for half a second" is an impossibly tough ask. It's really that bad. I first noticed this as a child, and 50 years later I'm still finding that I've underestimated the problem (lingering effects of COVID quarantine have made it far worse). Opinions spew so freely that real knowledge and insight read as opinions with extra attitude (explaining why facts these days often lose in a clash with mere opinion).

At some point I started paying attention to the world outside my roiling mental narrative. Also: thinking about what I've seen, using bandwidth freed up by not ceaselessly obsessing (everything sucks; I need more money and power and sex; that awful thing my eighth grade teacher said; the president's a racist, etc).

Between my attention-paying and my thinking about stuff beyond gripey bullshit, things get figured out. Not per sassy opinion, nor magical intuition. Just a normal brain doing what it does when processes aren't hijacked by endless loops of peevish dissatisfaction.

I "know", in other words, because, having decided that four million mental go-rounds of my litany of dissatisfactions and resentments were sufficient, I turned my attention elsewhere. And began noticing stuff. That's all it takes.