If you’ve ever learned to swim the crawl, you probably remember that in order to maximize streamlining, you should keep your head facing down, not looking forward. But another problem arises - how to avoid colliding with other people who are swimming ahead of you at a different pace. At first glance, the dilemma seems unsolvable, and the beginner is paranoid about turning his head up and down. But at some point you notice that a second before contact with another swimmer, your body picks up a faint but unmistakable signal. Although the water in the pool is always bubbling from someone else’s paddles in your lane or neighboring lanes, the feet of the swimmer in front of you create specific swirls that your radar instantly reads.
Whether your mind pays attention to this signal and trusts the readings is another matter. In any case, the body has warned you in time. I suspect that professional water polo players, who have spent their entire childhood and youth in a crowded pool, develop the ability to differentiate between water vibrations, though not to the same extent as the sharks, but enough not to bump into someone in a scramble. You might say that an acute need activates your latent ability, which has always been potentially at hand.
A similar phenomenon is observed when you are confronted with novelty. It takes time and a number of iterations for your peripheral vision to pick up the movement of some shadows. These are subtle patterns, like underwater currents, obvious to the expert, but inaccessible to the beginner. If you have reached Mastery in a specific field, then you do not even need to look, listen or touch anything - you just feel the invisible movement of tectonic plates with your gut. Such knowledge is expensive because it allows you to draw the threads of meaning out of the chaos of uncertainty one by one in order to weave them into strong and understandable fabric of structures. By the way, it is a criterion for finding out if you are a neophyte or a Sensei.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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