Instinct

My instincts told me to answer this writing prompt today – just kidding!

Do I trust my instincts? I think the poster meant intuition because humans do not strictly have instincts.

The answer is sometimes. I will follow it even if I’m wrong, which I often have been – especially when taking an alternate route while driving somewhere and getting far more lost trying to follow my intuition!

Sometimes it’s my inner voice demanding “Get out of here, NOW!” Other times it’s wanting to be careful of someone I’ve just met. I have seen that warning be unfounded, and I think I might have a faulty “people sensor”.

I will still listen to that sense because being right about them could mean terrible consequences for me.

Several weeks after 9/11/2001, I had the opportunity to go to a Boston Red Sox game with my mother and son, but I turned it down because there was a terrorist threat warning that day. Hundreds of people went anyway, and nothing bad happened except the Sox losing the game.

I still feel like a scared jerk about that – but the consequences if a bomb went off, or an attack happened, felt justifiable to skip it.

I’m not a huge risk-taker, but I have taken risks. So far, so good.

The worst risks are monetary. As a person in poverty, I have thrown a couple hundred bucks away on pyramid schemes that were very effectively talked up. If I worked hard at selling (and recruiting), I too, could be driving one of those pink Cadillacs.

What wasn’t clear was the amount I would have to hustle to sell and recruit to reach that lofty goal.

I was lucky to get out before being burned even more because it takes a sales personality and enough money up front for inventory – neither of which I have.

The good news(?) is that I learned another thing I was terrible at.

I am a good cook, but do not wish to be a chef. I’m good at listening, but don’t have the money to become a licensed social worker. I am a healer, but cannot quantify that into dollars.

I would have to accept donations if a client felt my help was valuable. That is not reliable income, and a landlord or the electric company, or any other utility company, is not known for mercy.

I see people charging hundreds of dollars per session for healing work, and all I know is that I experience some kind of energy flowing through me, but have no idea if I am directing that energy properly – or if it really works. I detest ripping people off.

Are you someone with good intuition? Do you think it is innate or something you cultivated?

If you are someone who has financially succeeded following your ‘instincts’ or intuition, how and what did (or do) you do?

Happy Thanksgiving all, and as always, thanks for reading!

Ruby Throated Hummingbird on branch — https://columbusaudubon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Ruby-throated_Hummingbird_TBenson.jpg

September 8 was the last time we saw the last hummingbird at our feeder, which hangs from the porch beam, and we often watch out of the big window that looks onto the front yard. I don’t normally notice the date, just that they’re gone, but this year it felt like a little grief. Maybe because these last few years have been filled with so much loss.

There were three ruby-throated hummingbirds who arrived in the last days of April or the beginning of May.

The feeder is four sided, with four perches, each in front of a red metal flower petal containing a tube for the hummingbirds to extract the sugar water ‘nectar’, but the hummingbirds guarded their turns at the feeder ferociously – fighting each other off, with each barely drinking for fighting so much.

“There’s enough for everyone,” my partner or I would call out sometimes, but they all wanted the bounty alone. I imagine they would fight even if we had four separate feeders.

We didn’t see any babies this year, and I wonder what happened.

For the first time ever, I saw a hawk swipe a robin chick from its nest with the distraught mother screaming out and attacking the hawk as it tried to speed off – but to no avail.

The hummingbird’s departure is the end of summer for me, even though the temperature this year has remained in the 80°F’s and 90°F’s. Climate change is well and truly here.

I, too, have the pull to move on though – but where? It’s not so easy to pick up and leave when you’ve never learned to pack light. I’ve also never liked change, but I’m drawn to it anyway, and I’m constantly changing – whether it’s hairstyles, or clothing, or organization (ha!).

It’s the big changes that cause me the most anxiety.

Like the hummingbird, maybe I have an internal clock telling me it’s time to go – but where? I have no homing instinct or intuition – and where is my ancestral home? I’m a mutt, as so many of us are. Would it be Canada, or Ireland, or Scotland, or England, or France?

Life has one true caution: “Adapt, or die.” Maybe that’s what my subconscious is trying to make conscious. Prepare, it urges. Maybe I interpret that as “leave”, when it just means “get out your warmer clothes.”

I know that acceptance and adaptation are paramount to survival. All of us creatures are constantly adapting – and we’re good enough at it that we haven’t wiped ourselves out – yet….