Instinct

Question I've been harboring in the back of my mind: If a wrong is committed by weakness and not by strength, by inaction and not action, is it any less wrong and why?

The older I get, I find that my ability to justify and to create strong reasons for any which scenario and position is increasingly befuddling and stifling my natural instinct. My skill in understanding all perspectives and ability to fight ardently for each one perpetuates terrible raging battles in my soul, such noisy clamoring and unrelenting arenas of turmoil that sometimes I throw my hands up to the sky and ask please for respite. For quiet and for the calm that comes from knowing and seeing less. Perhaps that is why we were only given two eyes and not twenty, a physically limited body and the inability to be two or three places at once; one heart that we may not have too many broken; one tongue so we can only hold one conversation at once. We are not nebulous like air or like liquid, everywhere at once, formless and free.

As a child, instinct reigned supreme and unquestioned, unchallenged by my then-nascent and unformed sense of logic and reason. A bad guy was a bad guy to be avoided, without having to give excuses for his "haunted past" and dig up countless reasons why he might be that way, to be hindered by matyr-like justifications to "reach out to him". A bad decision was a bad decision, without worrying about whether it could turn out somehow (however unlikely) to be a good decision.

Increasingly and without knowing, I have come to value and obssess over logic, reason, and my own sense of analysis and prize these over gut feeling, emotion, and instinct - perceiving the latter to be biased, weak, and deeply suspicious. I trust that everything has a reason and an explanation, and as an astute excavator I could doubtless uncover it all, if I am unrelentless and unforgiving about the pursuit.

But a conversation yesterday changed that. A little bit.

Since I was little, I have always had an affinity for a certain cousin of mine above others, and I have at multiple points questioned myself and wondered why. There was no ostensible reason for this preference, I did not spend time exclusively with her, in fact, rarely spent time together due to geographical reasons. But of course, at that tender age, like simply meant like, and I had not the motivation nor the skills to adequately parse through all the possible reasons explaning this preference, neither did I have the know-how to have carefully or artificially constructed these feelings through seasoned reasoning. But yesterday in a heartfelt conversation with her, I conclusively saw all the underlying, "core" similarities that we both harbor - something that I had instinctively felt a long long time ago but only now finally confirmed.

It reminded me of the mysterious power of instinct. And it should be so powerful, because as a child, as a teen, as a nebulous young thing with weak reasoning skills, we STILL need to survive, we STILL need to differentiate harmful from beneficial. And so we were given innate gut feelings so we could filter through environmental phenomena with some accuracy and speed, even while our mental reasoning capacities were developing. It wouldn't make sense for us to ONLY be able to make decisions when we have fully reasoned them out; because by then the zebra would have been dead if it didn't run when he first heard the lion, instead of trying to calculate the lion's velocity and vector position etc and its hunger rate etc etc. And as I alluded to in my earlier post, if we all remained motionless while waiting to be wise, the world would probably have died off a long while ago. I think reason and instinct should continually supplement and correct one another (checks-and-balances), but neither should be the dictator-tyrant.

Knowing me, I'd still try to parse through and analyze the reasons behind my instincts, but I'm grateful to have at least had this insight.

Who's to know, what a child dreams in his starry-eyed world or draws upon the blankness of his slate?