Your brain is omnipotent.
Your Soul is omnipresent.
Your Stomach is omniscient.
My third lesson of 2018 has been that no matter how big or small a decision is, your stomach knows the answer. It knows it before your brain can even send instructions to your mouth to speak it out loud.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Instinct comes from our human drives that date back thousands of years when our homo sapien selves wandered the grasslands of Africa and when our oldest part of the brain, the limbic system, was formed to aid survival of the fittest.
It was the birth of our emotional intelligence and how we began making decisions in a nanosecond to stay alive. It told us which one to choose between fight or flight.
For a few years I’d ignored my instincts and let my head work overtime making bad decision after bad decision. The day I found out my job opportunity in Hong Kong had fallen through and nine months of life planning and mindset preparation had essentially gone to waste, was the day I really realised that my stomach was filled with godly omniscience.
That afternoon I rushed home, put on my Ultraboosts and hit the pavements.
As my feet ran everywhere but nowhere through Sefton Park and along the Mersey promenade, my brain raced to catch up with my stomach. But it was pointless; my stomach had already made the decision within a millisecond and I knew it was right.
So I quit.
DIRECTOR OF DECISION MAKING
The brain over-analyses to the point where it creates a labyrinth of thoughts that you can’t always find your way out of and the heart has a habit of painting over reality with a rose tinted paste. The stomach is wise, it doesn’t need to understand, it knows through feeling.
It’s how Fate talks to you, it magnetises you towards what’s right and it gives you a date with destiny. The stomach knows love better than your heart or head ever could.
So since that day I appointed my Stomach as Director of Decision Making and I don’t think it’s failed me yet.
That burning ball of energy in my stomach had turned out to be the burning fire of liberation. I was free and close to the core of who I am for the first time in a long time. I was interested in everything and committed to nothing.
It led me to live out my limbo period with a more or less unshakeable determination, knowing that good things were to come.
It made me book a one way flight to Chiang Mai on a bit of a hunch, an experience that I think may have changed my entire life forever. It drew me to people, and places and things and they’ve all played an important role in the script of life.
It’s kept me calm and cool and collected in situations where all I need is focus – like illegally whizzing down a mountain in a banged out 80s car that wouldn’t start, or cycling on the most dangerous roads in the world. And just in the same way, it’s had me put my guard up when I sense that something isn’t quite right.
And when I’ve come up against criticism or questioning about what I’m doing with my life, why I’m on a gap year for geriatrics, why I have nineteen side hustles that aren’t generating cash or why I’m bothering to write this blog, my stomach steps in and has my back.
Because this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.
My whole entire body is covered in goosebumps writing those words. It knows they are true.
I don’t know exactly where any of it is going, but I know it’s somewhere rather than nowhere. It’s all related, it’s not without purpose and even if my brain rationally instructs me to, my stomach just won’t let me quit.
And if Fate doesn’t make you laugh, you just don’t get the joke.