The Body Knows Before the Mind Catches Up
I don't remember catching the ball.
I remember the pitch. I remember the bat making contact. I remember a white blur coming directly at my face — and then I remember looking at the back of my glove while everyone around me cheered. My dad had to tell me what happened. He said the ball was hit so hard it likely would have killed me.
First pitch. First game. First base.
My body caught it. I wasn't there.
That wasn't the first time.
Years earlier, growing up in Georgia, I lived next to my grandparents' farm. They had horses. I only rode a few times before deciding it wasn't for me — and the last time I rode made that decision permanent.
I was on a trail with my sister and grandfather, riding single file along a lake. I was in the lead on a horse named Charlotte — supposedly the calmest of the bunch. The trail was dense, the corner sharp, and without warning there was a cow on the path that had gotten loose from a nearby fence line.
The moment that cow flicked its ears, Charlotte reared up nearly vertical and threw me directly behind her back legs.
I remember the cow's ears.
I remember everything being calm again.
Nothing in between.
What I was told afterward: I curled into a precise position on the ground, and when Charlotte pivoted 180 degrees she landed directly over me — not on me. My sister and grandfather watched the whole thing. I remember none of it.
It took me years to understand what had happened in both of those moments.
My first instinct was to call it adrenaline. Instinct. Luck. The mind reaches for explanations because that's what it does — it needs to account for things, categorize them, file them away.
But here's what I've come to understand: those weren't lucky reflexes. That was a different kind of intelligence operating — one that doesn't run through the mind at all. The body knew exactly what to do, moved with surgical precision, and did it completely without me.
The mind wasn't slow. It wasn't overridden. It simply wasn't involved.
We are taught from birth to run everything through the mind. Every decision, every response, every question about what to do next — we bring it upstairs and ask the mind to sort it out. And the mind is genuinely good at many things. Analysis. Pattern recognition. Language. Planning.
But the mind was not built for everything we ask of it.
It was not built to know, in a fraction of a second, exactly where to position a body so a horse lands over it instead of on it.
It was not built to catch a ball it never consciously saw.
And I've come to believe it was not built to make the deepest decisions about your life either — who you are, what you're here for, which path is actually yours.
That kind of knowing lives somewhere else.
This is where my work begins.
Not with a framework. Not with a technique. With a simple, quiet recognition — that something in you already knows things your mind hasn't caught up to yet.
The question isn't how to think better.
The question is whether you're willing to listen to what was already speaking.
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