Reliability

Trust my instincts? With some reservations, yes.

Understand something about me, my instincts are finely trained, carefully honed, and acutely accurate. This does not mean that I let them off the leash to go baying like a pack of hounds.

You see, when I was younger, they were infamously terrible. They led me joyously, even rapturously, into many wonderful, even enjoyable boondoggles. That’s right, they were trained by trial and error, experience, a lack of good judgment, and youthful excess.

Eventually, I got to the point where I would say, “OH no! Not goin’ down that rabbit hole again!” And thus started the careful training and calibration of my instincts. You know! Bad judgments start hanging out in clumps, and a pattern forms. Even someone who is not a genius should start seeing the correlations.

So, now, on any given weekday, I can trust my “trained” instincts not to lead me astray. And if the pack smells something that I know is particularly tempting, but bad, I yell out “down! Dammit! Down.” I just don’t let them off the leash, and after a while, things calm down again.

Instincts are wonderful things, but you have to let them know who the boss is.