Does anyone remember when there was a snake living in my sage plant two years ago? I blogged about the morning that something deep inside my brain heard its rustle and propelled me in the opposite direction, and only afterward did I say to myself, "Oh, yes, that was a snake."
Last night I was walking Sandy after dark and a similar thing happened: a snake had draped itself in sigmoid curves across the sidewalk. Sandy didn't even notice it until we were almost on top of it, but I found myself unexpectedly in the street. That same reptile-fearing thing in my primitive brain recognized the shape and whisked me off the sidewalk before I even articulated the thought "that is a snake."
Thankfully there were no cars nearby (and, unlike the last time, no college students to wonder why I was hurling myself violently into the road). It's intriguing to me that my unconscious pattern-recognition system is so tuned in to those particular sights and sounds, and that it has the capacity to move me briskly and involuntarily to a different spot.
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