Guided by Intuition... or Not

I'm slowly getting addicted to Turkish TV. My latest guilty pleasure is a game show where the contestant opens chests to find money throughout the show. There's a lot more detail involved of course but basically, the entire concept is based on intuition and how much risk one is willing to take guided by it. The other night, a bus driver won enough money to pay off his debt, buy himself an apartment and spite his ex-wife who just left him. I had tears in my eyes.

What if your intuition is on vacation? Its cell phone turned off, it has no internet access on the remote island where it's vacationing and you have no desire to schlep all over creation to go looking for it (remember the 93 steps I need to take just to be able to go to the store for our daily bread?)

"A mother, with her intuition, will know just what to do. A mother has a feeling; she pays special attention, if someone is concealing, if someone's playing tricks. She rubs and scrubs and scours the secrets. Until the answer clicks," sings Carly Simon in Piglet's Big Movie. My intuition is most definitely on vacation.

The dictionary says intuition is the act of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes and  that is exactly why I feel that my intuition has left me at the moment and I'm somewhat paralyzed by this reality. I'm, in fact, consumed by rational processes.

I saw nine apartments in the past few days, in entirely different neighborhoods, mostly on foot, and collapsed in exhaustion last night. I found only one of them tolerable, though very small, because it was the cleanest and in the most central neighborhood, within walking distance to everything I could possibly want to have near the apartment. There were so many things I liked about it and I thought my gut said "This is it!" Now that I'm thinking with a clear head, I know it to be entirely too small for us and lacking most of the things we're really looking for in an apartment.

I think my lack of recent and meaningful history with this city, with these people, with even the act of not working has made me lose my guiding force, my intuition. And knowing that what I think is my gut instinct is fooling me makes me hypothesize, research and test everything I do twice over, which, as you can imagine, is entirely too tiring.

So... it is a blindingly-sunny Spring day in Istanbul with lots of possibilities and all I want to do is join my intuition on vacation.