Intuition, I worry, is in danger of becoming a quaint word no longer holding relevance. A bit like ‘quiddity,' a nostalgic tome but hardly rife in conversation, or one of those Victorian soup spoons with a guard to stop your moustache mixing it up with the Oxtail broth. At least I couldn't find one in Ikea.
Just like stealth taxes chip, chip, chipping away at our hard earned buck, trusting our intuition is heading the same way of gradual erosion. Take a daily Londoners life. If you drive, ‘Shat Nav,' sorry ‘Sat Nav' will probably get you to your destination but via a few dead ends, one way streets and an unplanned dip in the Thames. All the while when that voice in your head kept telling you to cut through Hyde Park.
You were going to make a salad for work from the fridge but the packet said it was out of date yesterday (it smelt ok to me though). Your clothes were determined by the fashion magazine telling you what to wear and your still single because your gut feeling was to call that hot date the very next day... but the ‘rules' told you to wait till midweek. Too late for the hot date, they thought you weren't interested and moved on. Undeterred you signed up for an online dating agency and forewent your immediate attractions for the ones the agency deemed compatible for you. Needless to say you are compatible with the guy from accounts because you both have finance degrees, but hey, 16st of hairy slob probably isn't going to float your boat.
What happened to trusting your intuition? Let's wake up to the fact that we are handing over our responsibility to others or other things on a daily basis. Forgetting to take a moment tap into the greatest resource we have as human beings - a natural ability to perceive far beyond our 5 senses and logic alone, and access deep insight, knowledge and inspiration that can guide us through virtually every area of our lives.
You could go as far as to say it's probably laid as a mission statement on some government memo - policy 262 intuition castration, the return of the sheep - The majority of images fed us in the media are all tapping into our subconscious ‘telling' us this is how it is through the mediums of fear and anger. Eat this, don't eat that, come here but don't go there, these are the ‘facts' as to why we have to invade Iraq, these are the ‘facts' as to why the pension you contributed to for 40 years is now worth a pittance and so it goes on. The voice in your head probably started off by going bo****ks that doesn't feel right to me, someone's pants are on fire, but we ignore it, too busy to stop and feel, so the next time the voice is quieter, until our intuition gives up trying to cut through the dross. Instead we cancel are well earned holiday flights to reduce our carbon footprint, and go get our flu jabs, because we should.
The thing is it's more than trusting our intuition it's about taking responsibility, it's about having a voice, your voice, a vocabulary, being discerning. Take flying these days a myriad of rules, expectations and limitations and do you really think only carrying 200 ml of grandma's face cream in a clear bag is all about terrorism - no it's a systematic castration of our ability to trust intuitively what feels right for us. So we pay our congestion charge, know we should complain about checking if oyster took payment even though the tube was cancelled, but don't and then go and sign up for another years membership at the gym. Even though your inner voice is belly laughing warning you how you'll never keep it up, but we sign up because we were told we should and that seems to be the current way of things.
Maybe I'll carry a placard and march on Parliament square, chanting bring back intuition, but instinctively that doesn't feel right, (a bit new agey) I'll buck the trend and keep listening to my inner voice and dump the placard. On a more sobering note I should have been on the 7/7 tube at Edgware rd, but on that day, my intuition led me on a route via Victoria. On a lighter note after 5 years of never thinking about getting a spare key for my car, my inner voice told me too last week, that one got away from me, three days later I dropped my keys down a drain - too late - I was told and although I listened I didn't act and that's what its all about, the quiddity of it (the essence, the real nature of a thing), you can listen to me telling you to trust your intuition, but by acting on it you get to own it