GUT TRUST
What do I know? Hmmm. Hard to tell. What do I feel? Wellll. Hard to know.
I am trying to make some sense out of a world that is becoming more and more complex. I don’t even know how to pronounce many of the words I encounter in print every day. I don’t want writers and publishers to “dumb it down” for me. I just want to have some facts presented; I’ll try to decide how what I think about the facts, how I feel about them. To be honest, I have a short attention span; I am used to reading, hearing, thinking, feeling in short bursts — separated by longer periods of nothingness.
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I am trying not to multi-task. I am trying to do one thing at a time. When I eat, I experience the food — how does it taste, smell, feel, sound, look, move? When I listen to music — I try to focus on the words, the instrumentation, the rhythms, the patterns — and the emotional impact the music has on me, the feelings it produces in me. When I read — a book, a magazine, a newspaper, an e-zine, a catalog — I sometimes read aloud; I am trying for more sense, more understanding.
As I write, I could be listening to music, or to the news, or to a ball-game. I could be checking e-mails and text messages and tweets and Facebook postings — all while I try to focus on writing about my world and my place in it. I could, but I don’t. When I write, I just think and write. Then I read and re-write.
For all the things that I think about, I seem to place more reliance on the things I feel. Maybe believing is better than knowing? Listen to your heart, go with your gut?
“Trust your heart rather than your head.” Jean-Jaques Rousseau
