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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Intuition

 

As I approach seven decades, I have become much more aware that aging is many things, an accumulation of changes that happened in quick succession causing some parts of me to grow while other parts of me decline.

I’ve become more cognizant of the important matters in my life, which, more and more, are always things, while, willfully, I am less aware of the insignificant, which, more and more, are people.  

You have no doubt heard the expression “Age is just a number” is a dumber way of saying that our sense of spirit, my eternal being, has gotten better and seems to get better with every passing day.

I think this change is due largely to my growing and ever-expanding reliance on my intuition. Unlike the use of my legs or the ability to lift heavy things, my intuition has gotten better with age, and the more I rely on it, the more reliable it has become. I feel wiser for using it and I wonder if the use of our intuition is a natural part of aging.  When we are young, for men anyway, we can rely on our quickness and our strength, as we age, at least in my case, fast no longer defines me, in fact, I avoid fast things now, they tire me out.  As I said, my terrific strength, built by decades of manual labor that I hated  is far, far less than it was.  Nowadays, before lifting anything seemingly heavy, I have to ask myself  “Is it worth a heart attack?” a real possibility in my case. Of course, we have to be careful in our use of intuition because as we age, cognition and emotion impact the decision processes. It's simply a part of life.

The older we get our deliberative processes, the ability to critically examine an issue lessens.  That is balanced out by our stability and emotional processing increases. The bottom line is it all balances out. By relying more on our stability of emotions and less on our declining deliberative faculties, the quality of their decisions is significantly improved. As Camus wrote, “To grow old is to move from passion to compassion.”