Your Intuition Guided You Here - Part 3

Seven o'clock came.

I casually looked at the clock for the forty-seventh time.

Still casual.

Still definitely not waiting for anyone.

A few travellers wandered through the lounge.

Someone was making instant noodles in the communal kitchen.

Someone else was playing cards.

Every time footsteps echoed down the hallway, my nervous system launched a full-scale investigation.

Is that him?

Nope.

What about now?

Also no.

The thing about waiting is that your mind starts filling in the blanks.

Maybe he'd changed his mind.

Maybe he'd met someone else.

Maybe he'd forgotten.

Maybe I'd completely imagined the chemistry between us in the first place.

And underneath all of that was another thought I couldn't have articulated back then:

What if I got this wrong?

Because that's how most of us think intuition works.

We believe intuition is supposed to predict the future.

As if that nudge, feeling, knowing, or pull is only valid if the story ends the way we hoped it would.

But intuition has never worked like that.

Intuition doesn't promise outcomes.

It offers direction.

It nudges us toward experiences, lessons, people, decisions, conversations, and crossroads that our logical mind often couldn't map out in advance.

The problem is that we usually assess intuition in hindsight.

We look at what happened and decide whether the guidance was "right" or "wrong."

The relationship ended, so it must have been wrong.

The business didn't succeed, so it must have been wrong.

The opportunity didn't turn out the way we expected, so clearly we misread the signs.

But life isn't that binary.

Sometimes intuition leads you toward joy.

Sometimes it leads you toward growth. - Yep!

Sometimes it leads you toward heartbreak that unlatches a hidden part of you that desperately needed healing (and this was the case with tall guy).

And sometimes it leads you toward exactly what you need, even when it looks nothing like what you wanted. (This is a big yes too).

Back in that hostel lounge, I didn't know any of this.

I simply thought there was one question that mattered:

Will Tall Guy show up?

But now, looking back, I can see there was a much bigger question being asked.

Not whether he would arrive.

But whether I was willing to trust myself before I knew the ending.

I'd almost given up.

To be fair, it was only 7:05.

But in the five minutes since seven o'clock, I'd already imagined every possible scenario.

He changed his mind.

He forgot.

He met someone else.

He was, in fact, a serial killer.

Then suddenly he came charging through the hostel door.

"Sorry I'm late! I'm here, I'm here!"

Slightly out of breath, he held up a bottle of red wine.

"I took too long choosing the wine."

I laughed.

"Good choice."

Our date wasn't exactly fancy.

We sat on an old brown couch in the hostel common room, one armrest ripped open just enough to expose the greenish foam underneath.

But none of that mattered.

Because within minutes, I realised Tall Guy wasn't the stereotypical player I'd assumed he was.

You have to understand the context here.

My local haunt back in Australia was Northies at Cronulla Beach every Sunday night.

And let's just say that place produced a very specific type of guy.

The tanned surfie.

The charming flirt.

The guy who knew exactly what to say and exactly how little he meant by it.

I'd lumped Tall Guy into the same category before I'd even spoken to him.

Turns out, I was spectacularly wrong.

Because Tall Guy was into spirituality.

Now, this is 2004.

Before social media.

Before podcasts.

Before influencers.

Heck, I'd only learned how to use email the year before I left for this trip.

There were no spiritual Instagram accounts.

No TikTok teachers.

No YouTube rabbit holes to disappear down at 11pm.

Everything I'd learned about meditation, energy, and personal growth came from a small meditation group I'd been attending for years.

And honestly?

I'd never met anyone outside that group who actually got it.

Who got me.

The more we talked, the more humbled I felt.

I realised how quickly I'd judged him.

And the more he spoke, the more I found myself thinking:

Okay, Tall Guy... I'm listening.

The previous year had sent me on a quest.

After a surgeon told me the tumour I'd had could return, and that if it did there was an 80-90% chance it would be cancerous, I'd become obsessed with understanding why so many people were getting sick.

Why cancer rates seemed to be climbing.

Whether there was anything I could do to avoid that future.

I started reading everything I could get my hands on.

GMO debates.

The story of Percy Schmeiser taking on Monsanto.

Environmental issues.

The growing concerns around climate change.

Tall Guy knew all about Percy and then started telling me about David Suzuki and the work he was doing to educate people about environmental destruction and its impact on all forms of life.

I remember sitting there thinking:

What the actual hell?

This was not the conversation I expected to be having tonight.

And yet it was exactly the conversation I'd been longing for.

We shared the bottle of wine.

Hours seemed to disappear.

Eventually, he walked me back toward my room.

And then came that moment.

You know the one.

Oh gosh.

Oh gosh.

My heart is racing.

What do I do?

What do I do?

I did absolutely nothing.

Thankfully, one of us knew what they were doing.

He stepped forward and hugged me.

And in that moment, I felt safer than I had in years.

Maybe it was his size.

Maybe it was because, for the first time, I'd spent an evening talking about things that genuinely mattered to me.

Spirituality.

Health.

The deeper questions.

Why we're all spinning around on this giant rock in the first place.

Or maybe it was because for years I'd been running.

Doing what I thought I was supposed to do.

Work hard.

Push through.

Ignore the whispers from my body.

Keep going.

Rinse and repeat.

But sometime over the previous year, I'd stepped off that roundabout.

I'd stopped blindly following the script.

My job now wasn't to climb a ladder.

It wasn't to impress anyone.

It was to listen.

To trust my intuition.

To discover who I was beneath all the conditioning.

And somehow, that simple hug, with no kiss attached to it, no pressure and no agenda, did something inside me that I still struggle to explain.

From that moment on, we were inseparable.

Until he dropped the bomb...