An Intuitive Leap Into the Future

What remains after all hope is gone, and why intuition just might be the ultimate guide to what's next.

I’m snuggled on the couch in my kitchen (shoutout for kitchen couches everywhere) with my pup by my side, after a long time away in another part of the world. I went to Cairo with almost no cash and returned with less, at the beck and call of my intuition that shook me hard and said, GO HERE now, and I complied, against all logic and my better judgment, and oh my God, I’m so glad I did.

This is the kind of thing, I’ve assumed forever was the opposite of adulting, a sign of immaturity or some essential strain of conventional wisdom, but I’m learning slowly, painfully, that the beck and call of intuition (while being low on public approval from time to time) is actually something I must heed, if I want access to other worlds and ways of being that can expand me beyond this one.

And this world we’re in right now…sheesh, what a doozy.

The old rules are being upended and shadowy narratives once swatted away are moving onto center stage with all the accompanying chaos and carnage. And it’s scary what can happen, and what’s unfolding. And all the ways it’s inevitable, but also not exactly what we wanted. The foundations are shaking, and along with it all the rhythms that once pulled things into some kind of recognizable cadence.

Being in Cairo, I got to see what life is like possibly ten or twelve years in the future. After the agitation over so much injustice, after the organizing, after the revolution, after the overthrow, and then the After after that—the part where the people had a choice about how they wanted to govern themselves once they actually won, the part where it was harder than they thought to bring forward structure and leadership that reflected their most beautiful values.

The part where the more organized and most structured groups were poised to take back power.

The part then where that lack of cohesion and collaboration and nuts and bolts togetherness meant someone else won—and with that win brought forward a heavy-handedness that was more restrictive than the one that was there in the first place.

“The thing you have to understand,” my friend Selim tells me, “is that our hearts are still broken from the revolution. We haven’t healed yet.”

And I wonder why my intuition brought me here to see and hear and pray and dream with the dreamers whose hopes got dashed. The ones who have nothing left to do now, but be together, to see each other almost everyday, to tell stories, to make things, to create, to chant, to cry, to wonder, to ask what the future means now that so much of a certain kind of hope is gone.

“You make me think my life is beautiful,” my beloved Sara tells me, “Like poetry.”And it’s true, it is, even as I witness the heartbreak, but also so much creation, so much affection, so much tenderness, taking root in the cracks, in the liminal spaces, in the impossible corners where the cure continues to propagate.

Pay attention, my intuition says to me. Notice.

And I realize that listening to my intuition is like being fast tracked through a portal to a place where strange and hard to understand pieces of the puzzle are waiting for me. Pieces that morph into disks of hot bread and fresh cucumbers and homemade hummus, grilled quail and smoked sweet potatoes roasted fresh on the street. Pieces that fortify my curiosity and feed my courage. Pieces that for all the loss of dreams still carry the somatic collective memory of rising up, pouring out onto the street, locking arms and saying, “The people demand the fall of the regime.”

Pieces that say now after the fall, after the disappointment, after the dream, there is somehow some indefatigable thing still pulsing, underneath it all.

Something that finally looks you straight in the eye without reservation.

Something that isn’t afraid of being close.

Something that isn’t afraid of the truth.

Something that knows that if the world ends, you’ll crack open like a seed and find your way back to the dark fertile ground and plant yourself in the muck of togetherness over and over again.

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