The funniest time I ever followed my gut and it worked out was probably when I told my sister two weeks after meeting Mr. ‘Splainer (and two whole dates later) that this was the man I was going to marry.
She was still in high school.
“Don’t you think that’s a little premature?” she asked. Probably more mature than I was at that point in time, but I was right. We did marry, although we decided some weeks later we had rushed things a bit and needed to slow down, make friends first.
From our first date, we would stay together for 41 years, three weeks, and 6 days, almost down to the hour, until he died in 2014.
I think Westerners, by and large, like to think that they operate purely rationally–it was one of the things that freaked the Victorians out so badly over Freud’s theories. But in modern psychology, we, like Freud, recognize that there is a healthy balance to be found between ‘gut’ and brain, that emotions and reason both play critical roles in decision-making. There’s even a test for it–my old favorite, the Rorschach, covers that in the scoring.
Most of us are not dead center but characteristically lean a little heavier on one. Some people lean almost entirely on one to the exclusion of the other, and are consequently unable to use all of their internal resources to make the best decisions. Some of us–and I am one–swing from one extreme to the other. I’m just as likely to experience analysis paralysis as to regret acting on impulse.
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