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It seems to me that one of the chief joys of blogenstance is reading your friend’s posts, learning about their lives, their good times and trials and tribulations and sharing their views – and occasionally finding that one of them has helped you to unlock a door in your mind.

It could take the form of Rick, who introduced me to the notion that racism is in fact an artificial, mental construct. Something I now believe and almost, almost understand, I’m still wrestling with the mechanics.

Or Wendy, who is sweetness incarnate and has been struggling recently because she is intuitive to the extent that the ‘connections’ she observes are so acute that coincidence just isn’t a good enough explanation.

And it’s what Wendy wrote recently that that struck a chord with me. What she seems to be describing is something I believe in utterly, and part of the overall belief system I hold. It’s not a completely developed ‘science’ of beliefs – it’s just the essence of what I think of as the truth:

That life is a wonderful accident, that we are in fact a remarkable, walking, talking, thinking, speaking accident of physics. There is no grand plan, no higher force, only nature. There is nothing that is ‘super natural’, only things that we don’t understand.

We connect with our world through our senses. They are remarkable but not mysterious. But we are also apt to other influences that we can’t explain, moments of what we call intuition. We’re aware of being watched, most of us have had an experience where we knew that the telephone would ring moments before it did, or heard a silent voice warning us of danger to ourselves or a loved one.

Have you ever been a room when your cat has hissed and spat at a spot on the wall, just like all the others, and then fled the room? Unnerving isn’t it?

I’m sure that what we are experiencing is a residual trace of another faculty that we once possessed which I would choose to call ‘perception’. A sense that we probably still possess in full measure, but that we have subverted as, over the course of time, we have come to place more and more emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge.

Our other senses provide us with a information that’s both good and bad, our eyes see beauty and ugliness in equal measure, and though we might not like what we see, we are not perturbed by how we receive the message? So imagine looking at a tree that appears to be perfectly healthy from the outside, that’s the message that you receive from your eyes – but at the same time you 'perceive' a canker deep inside it.

Unfortunately, if there was a conflict between our senses then we have tended to rely less and less on our intuition.

I believe that we have lost a perfectly natural gift that allowed us to connect more intuitively with our surroundings. After all radio waves travel through walls, light travels immense distance in an imperceptible moment, and we believe in (but can only prove in theory) subatomic particles and a brown matter that fills the spaces in the universe that we can’t otherwise account for.

Is it ‘unnatural’ then to suppose that the general health of a person might project itself to a loved one over a distance? Or that we might sense an impending accident, sense the storm coming, know the mood of a friend, loath a cheerful stranger or know a friend in an unlikely appearance – isn’t it possible that we are simply receiving a signal just like sight but on a different wavelength?

At least that’s what I believe, that it’s a great loss, and if you do happen to be highly intuitive then you should consider it a gift and indulge it.


And if you’ve not dozed off by now after wading through ‘the world according fish’ you might like to say hello to Anne, who’s lovely.