Saturday, August 3, 2013

Knowing

Bloomsbury Coffee House
12oz Coffee
12oz Chocolate Milk (shared)

I'm on a date with my first-born, so this should be short.

When I was pregnant with the darling child across from me, I got a call from my brother informing me that I was having a girl.  He said he had a feeling - he just knew it was a girl.  Don't bother coming up with boy names 'cause it's definitely going to be a girl.  I had had a feeling, too.  I had a flash of insight at the moment of conception knowing that I had conceived and knowing that it was going to be a boy.  A split second later the certainty was disregarded and I had no feeling whatsoever which way it was going to go.

As the ultrasound later confirmed, I was right on both counts.

But did I really know?  My brother knew and he knew wrong.  Did I have the truer knowing because it was my own body, my own child?  Or was it just a statistical certainty (hermaphroditic offspring aside) that one of us was going to be right?

I believe in intuition, especially the spontaneous and inexplicable kind.  I often use the example of driving home from work one night and having a split-second urgent impulse to take the first exit home instead of the closer second exit.  It was so sudden and illogical that I didn't take the exit.  A moment later, as I wondered what in the world that was all about, I rounded the bend of the freeway and had to slam on my brakes to avoid the stopped traffic in front of me.  It took me another half hour to go the one mile to my exit and get home.

So it does seem to me that something is at work.  What?  I don't know.  It could be that we're connecting to some collective unconsciousness, or to some meta-field of energy permeating the Universe, and we can for a moment follow the threads of future events.  Or perhaps we're just processing information we don't even know we've received, and it bursts to the surface in a way that we don't perceive the connections.  As I said, I don't know.  But even if it's there, it seems highly unreliable, especially if it's someone else's certainty. 

And who's to say that future events don't change after we've had some intuitive message about them? 

All I know is that I have learned better than to disregard a gut feeling - especially when it makes no sense.  I've also learned not to read too specifically into a feeling.  If it's not obvious, don't push it, because it's probably something other than you expect.  Perhaps someday my darling son Henry will become my "fabulous" son Henry, and his uncle will have been kind of right, after all.

Who knows?

1 comment:

  1. If there is one thing in this life that I have complete faith in it is intuition. I do believe that we not only connect to the collective unconsciousness, but also as you say, "some meta-field of energy permeating the Universe" (that was lovely, by the way) AND I also believe that future events change - even if we've had some intuitive message about them.

    Have you ever had an experience and then solidly remembered a dream you had in which that experience happened? Perhaps even involving people you only just met? Or have you had a dream of something happening and then later find it happening (but maybe the details are a bit out of order)? Or thought of a song and then turned on the radio and there it was playing? Or thought hard of a friend and called them to find them crying about a lost love? This stuff happens to me all the time and it is very frustrating because I can't control it. I always know when something dreadful is going to happen (usually within a few days) but I never know WHAT the thing is. I can't figure out what the point of this is if it's as useless as it is. Perhaps it's just a by-product of existence. Like we're antennas picking up on future events or we subconsciously pick up on all the cues and like super computers our brains figure out the details. It'd be nice to have some scientist take it seriously enough to study.

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