Tommy and the Contractor
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A year ago, we hired a contractor to renovate our bathroom. Our dog Tommy HATED this guy.
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Every time he came through the door, Tommy would growl and bark. Throughout the week the guy was here, Tommy didn’t warm up to him one bit.
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A couple weeks after the renovation, we discovered that the guy had done a bunch of shoddy work. Septic backed up into the new bathroom. We had to have the whole thing repaired.
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Here’s what I think:
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Tommy knew this guy was bad news the whole time.
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How is that possible?
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And how did WE not see it?
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Well... here’s the thing.
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If I’m honest, I can tell you that I DID see
it.
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Something about this guy didn’t sit right from the beginning.
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But he had been referred to us by someone who vouched for him.
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How bad could he be?
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I chose logic over intuition, and bowled over my gut instinct.
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We might think of “intuition” as hokey or woo-woo. But in actuality, it’s one of our most reliable faculties.
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Scientists date the first emergence of a “brain-like structure” to about 560 million years ago (in a worm called the Urbilaterean). The purpose of the early neurons contained within that structure was to sense and respond to the organism’s environment.
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By contrast, our “higher thinking” brain anatomy only developed about 200,000 years ago.
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Oh- and that Newtonian model of logic that we all accept as the gold standard? It only arrived with the industrial revolution, less than 300 years ago.
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So basically for hundreds of millions of years, our brains perfected a highly attuned ability to sense what’s happening around us.
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And a few years ago, we decided we knew
better.
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In my own life, I’ve spent too long dismissing my “feeling” wisdom. Today, I’m fascinated by the guiding light of something more wild, more primitive, and evidently, more highly evolved.
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I’ve committed to living by intuition for the rest of 2020. To following my gut and seeing where it takes me.
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And hey- if I’m ever in doubt, I suppose I’ll always have Tommy to tell me what to do.