First of all, I’m sorry my blog has been a bit quiet the past few weeks. There has been a lot going on in my life, including the very important task of renewing my green card. JoAnn and I have been happily married for almost 22 years. I’ve been a legal permanent resident since January 5, 1998, and obviously, we wish for this state of affairs to continue.
The good news is that I have now completed the biometric process required by USCIS, and a new green card will, I believe, be coming my way in due course.
I want to share some thoughts about intuition in this post. The older I get, the more years roll by, the more I wonder and marvel at this remarkable gift given freely to us all.
We don’t have to listen to our intuition, of course. We can pooh-pooh the very notion if we wish. But I have found in my own life that listening to that “still, silent voice” within has been critical not only to helping me overcome various challenges in my life, but critical, also, to coming closer in experience to the place of happiness and peace that exists in each of us and that I believe is the core of being.
Continuing a bit in this vein, I’d like to share two or three examples of the role “intuition” has played in my life, from small, everyday events to bigger, more important, indeed life-changing events.
I was a bit put out a week or two ago when our paper, the Sunday edition of the Denver Post, failed to arrive. I called to report it and waited for the paper to appear as promised. For an hour at least, my wife or I went out to look but it wasn’t there.
What to do? Then, out of nowhere, my intuition spoke up. “The paper is there now,” it said quietly. I went to look, and the paper indeed was waiting for me.
Here’s another example, on a bit different scale, that I may have mentioned on this blog before. I was in my early 20’s, working as a reporter on a London daily newspaper, thinking to myself, “Is this all that is going to happen in my life,” when suddenly, out of the blue, some words thundered in my inner self: ‘Go to British Columbia.”
What? I said to myself. “Go to British Columbia?” “Is this for real?”
I was in considerable confusion. Leave my family? Leave my roots? Leave a good-paying job to go to a land where I didn’t know a soul?
But then the voice spoke again: “Go spend a day by the sea, and you will know for sure what the right thing to do is.” As I wandered the Sussex Downs, skylarks soaring and singing above me, the ocean my close companion, I knew for sure it really was the right thing for me to go to British Columbia no matter what my mind thought or didn’t think about it.
It was a similar story much later on in my life when I came face to face with another big decision. I won’t bore you with all the details. But at the age of 63, still living in British Columbia, in a state of total despair following the death of my first wife and the “death” of the spiritual community in which I had lived for 36 years, my intuition came knocking on my door once again.
Again, I won’t bother you with all the details. But I became aware, I believe with the help of “intuition”, of a woman named JoAnn, retired from Shell Oil, who lived in a townhouse in Denver and who was also thinking to herself, “Surely there is more to life than this.”
Long story short, the United States kindly allowed me to come to Denver for two months so I could decide if I really did like JoAnn and wanted to marry her, and so she could decide if she really did want to marry me.
A pretty big choice, right? Fortunately, we both decided we really did want to give it a go and get married. We both listened to our intuition and felt it was the right thing to do. So here we are now, in our upper 80’s, still doing our best every day to listen to the sweet call of truth from within ourselves that is the source of all true happiness and fulfillment.