How do sensitive people think?
We are quick multi-tasking big picture intuitive associative thinkers. A more logical mind might wonder if we aren’t all over the place and scattered. But we (mostly) know what we are doing.
Of course logical thinking has much use and value. But what is going on in sensitive intelligence most of the time is just so much bigger, deeper, with so many more possibilities. Sensitive intelligence is always seeking truth. The truth is a deep through-line with many many rich, divergent pathways. Logical thinking would do well to partner with sensitive intelligence.
Here is a great example of how sensitive people process information, from a post in Facebook by writer Diana Gabaldon, author of the wonderful and wildly popular Outlander series, now a television series on Starz.
She is not talking about “sensitive intelligence” — but she is…
Does this sound familiar?
My favorite analogy regarding research is what I call “Hot dogs and beans.”
Consider that you’re planning dinner for your family. You decide to have hot dogs and beans; tasty and cheap and everybody likes them. You have a busy life, and thus an assistant—you tell the assistant to go to the store and get hot dogs and beans for you. The assistant does, and you have a nice supper.
OK. If you go to the store yourself, you’re intending to get hot dogs and beans. But on your way to the sausage-and-cheese section, you pass the fresh meat section—where you observe that there’s a sale on organic chicken breasts. “Ooh,” you think. “I could make chicken curry!”
So you get the chicken breasts, go back through the aisles to get spices, vegetable juice, mango-peach applesauce, mango chutney, jasmine rice…and coming back toward the front of the store with this, you pass through the fresh produce section and see the water droplets gleaming among the fresh lettuces and long green onions—and it occurs to you that a shrimp salad would be Really Good with the curry—so you go back to Meats and get half a pound of fresh baby shrimp, then to the condiments aisle for dressing—and thence to the chilled wine cabinet near the checkout, for a lovely dry Riesling, which will just top this meal off….
Well, if you write historical novels and you depend heavily on research assistants, you get hot dogs and beans.
Which is why I always go to the store myself.
Find Diana Gabaldon on Facebook. This post was from October 3, 2014.
Her website: http://www.dianagabaldon.com
Mandala created for me by Sheryl Harrell, www.cocreativementoring.com
