T-Minus 1 Day: Intuitive Advice

Tomorrow I drive out to the edge of the earth, also known as Thousand Oaks, in order to participate in a yearly ritual of mine.

Every year, I visit a Jewish grandmother named Judy, who works in a New Age book store located in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles. Judy reads tarot cards, but she doesn't claim to be a psychic - she gives "intuitive advice". She's takes personal growth very seriously, and she definitely enjoys showing off.

Why do I do this?

The stock answers are: the entertainment value, the predictive data, the action-guiding advice. And I enjoy all of these things, but my reasons are a bit different.

I see Judy to mark my progress. It's a good way to look back at where I've been, and to see where I'm going. She has the ability to spread the map of my life across the table, and survey the entire landscape. She has a very keen sense of what the current challenges of my life are, and what the next ones will be. Judy speaks not of weeks, or months, but of years. Her favorite unit of time is 18 months. Which is precisely the amount of time this endeavor will last.

Remember the events that precipitated the creation of this website? She called them all ten months ago, and I'll see if I can wrangle up some MP3s to prove it. Last year, she told me "with 90% certainty" that I would leave my job to pursue writing on my own.

Despite that bold prediction, very little of our sessions are comprised of concrete predictions about the future; there is some fortune-telling, but most of the time is filled by old-fashioned wisdom acquired through the time-honored process of living. This wisdom serves as a transition between subjects, and camouflages the paucity of actual precognitive data.

It's excellent wisdom, however - the kind I rarely receive, if ever. Just about everything she said was true and helpful, and she was merciless in driving me towards crucial insights and revealing admissions about my life.

Admittedly, wisdom isn't a supernatural ability, and may not be worth eighty dollars an hour. But she has one astonishing ability that is both: the ability to intuitively understand the secret inner lives of people, even people who aren't present.

The most impressive parts of my readings consist of her speaking to me about the personal histories and hidden feelings of people she couldn't possibly know anything about: my parents, my brother, my friends.

When I listen to the tape of the session, I cannot ascribe these feats to psychology or performance. The specificity and familiarity and ease with which she discusses people close to me - as if they are close to her too - is what makes the experience supernatural.