My grandmother never used a thermometer for bread. She pressed her wrist to the dough the way you’d press it to a feverish child’s forehead. A deliberate gesture, a reading. Too warm, too cool, just right. She had made bread long enough that the knowledge lived on the surface — in the skin — bones — in past generations, not in any instrument.
I think about this every time I agonize over a decision.
Here is what I have observed about the people I know who proclaim they are lost.
They have read all the books. They have taken all the courses. They have saved all the bookmarks, made the spreadsheets, consulted the frameworks, ritualized their mornings, watched every sunrise only to stay pale, color-coded the spreadsheets to only tire their eyes, and asked everyone they know for an opinion. They are drowning in information.
What they lack is the willingness to trust the thing they already know.
The body knows first.
That's anatomy, not necessarily mysticism. The nervous system registers threat and possibility long before the conscious mind has organized the data into a sentence. You walk into a room, and something shifts in your chest — something opens, or closes — before you have spoken to anyone, before you have seen anything clearly. The body has already decided. It trembles or loves, instantly. The mind spends the next three days catching up and calling it thinking it through.
I do Tarot not because I believe the cards know things I don't.
I do it because the image on the card is a mirror that makes the body respond before the mind can intervene. Pull a card, and your stomach either drops or lifts. That response — before you've read the meaning and God knows I'm against any codified meaning — before you've applied any framework — that is the answer. The card permitted you to feel what you already knew.
The problem is that we have been educated out of trusting it. We have been trained to produce evidence for our positions, to defend our knowing with logic, to be suspicious of certainty that arrives without argument. And some of that is wise, but some of it is just fear as rigor.
I have made my worst decisions by ignoring the body and following the argument. I moved somewhere because the reasons were impeccable, and the whole body said no. I agreed to collabs because the money was right, and my gut said no. I stayed in situations because the logic of staying was airtight, and the body had been screaming its NOs. Every time, I dressed it up as careful thought. Every time, the body had been right the whole time.
Our body is telling us something right now. You know what it is. The body knows the difference. The body that says this is wrong feels different from the body that says this matters, and I am afraid. You know which is which. You have always known.
Are you willing? is the question.
My grandmother never second-guessed that dough. She had made enough bread to know what she knew — and yes, that knowing came from repetition, from failure, from loaves that didn't rise and people who didn't like the crust. But at some point, she pressed her wrist and knew.
We have pressed our wrists to our own lives more times than we can count.
You know what you know.
The invitation is to stop stalling and call it thinking.
