If Guts Could Talk

My mother has a saying, “If in doubt, don’t.” It’s a very good saying.

The whole concept of trusting your gut has a history in American culture, one that reached its heyday in gritty noir fiction with noble taciturn detectives who can somehow sense the truth amidst a seedy morass of narratively complicated lies.

Oh, and on NCIS. There too.

While it’s a very good saying, it’s not always a good idea.

Sometimes our guts tell us things we only want to be true in the exact same tone that they use for real instinct. If guts could speak. It’s a metaphor, dammit. Come on.

Work with me here.

Of course Auntie was just misled by her gut, otherwise this post would be about something completely different. I ran with what I wanted to be true. It wasn’t. The damage control is done, so now I can focus on helping all you darlings avoid my mistakes.

Auntie spends a lot of time trying to help you avoid my mistakes, though apparently not the grammatical ones.

Ahem.

Where were we? Oh yeah. Instinct.

If you’ve been paying attention to whatever is going on around you, your subconscious will do the algebra of applying your values and (possibly variable) inclinations to your immediate and long-term goals and give you a nudge toward how you should act. We call that instinct, when we think about it at all.

As a system, it has its ups and downs.

We tend to jump faster toward what we want to than what we ought to, no matter how loudly our better natures shout at us not to get fries with that.

Which pedal do you hit on a yellow light? That’s usually determined by instinct.

When you’re having a conversation and you need to respond, do you make a joke or take it seriously? It all depends.

I guess it always all depends.

Like right now my instinct is to make an adult-diaper joke. But I doubt I could make a new one. “If in doubt, don’t.”

Trusting my gut this time, so I won’t.