There's this moment right before understanding clicks - have you felt it? That strange familiarity with something you haven't quite grasped yet?
I've been calling it "pre-knowing" in my head. Not quite intuition (that feels too mystical somehow), but that sense that part of you is already in conversation with what you're about to understand.
It's like when you're trying to remember a word and it's right on the tip of your tongue. You don't know it yet, but you know exactly where it fits. You can feel the shape of the understanding before it arrives.
I wonder if that's actually how most knowing works - not building brick by brick, but sensing the whole shape first and then filling in the details.