Following Instinct: Amaryllis Fox at TEDxTeen

so when i was 17 i like many of you guys was deciding between to apologize in my case it was aerospace engineering at the naval academy or law at oxford and they seemed like such wildly different paths in life and i so wanted to do both of them and i couldn't so i did what we've all been taught to do i sat down and wrote a list of pros and cons the naval academy meant the chance to be a naval aviator to fly tomcats off of aircraft carriers and maybe someday to pilot the space shuttle but i was scared that all that discipline would crowd out the arts and creativity and i didn't know about being asked to fight for something if i didn't believe in it and maybe most importantly i was pretty sure i didn't want to make my bed with hospital corners every morning on the other hand oxford was this life of intellectual exploration of c.s lewis and jrr tolkien conversations about the meaning of things deep into the night but i was scared that cloistering myself away and academia would start to be suffocating and it would be hard to make a contribution in the world while studying things in the abstract so as long as i spent on this list and as much advice as i asked from people i trusted i didn't get any closer to making up my mind and as a last-ditch effort i signed up for a two-week volunteer trip to thailand to the burmese border i'd been involved with the burmese political refugee community in washington dc while i was in high school and i figured maybe some geographic perspective would help make up my mind so off i went on this american kid overseas journey with 14 other kids and it was wonderful and at the end of it i was standing at the gate at bangkok airport and the other 14 kids were on the plane and the team leader an amazing guy called jeremy says amaryllis get on the plane and i had no idea i was going to do it that morning but i said you know i think i'm gonna stay and the poor guy is in loco parentis and not remotely comfortable with leaving a teenager in thailand uh but we talk and the plane's leaving and eventually he gets on it and i walked out the automatic sliding doors into the sticky heat and there are green taxis dropping off families and crates and suitcases and i have this one thought going through my mind okay amaryllis what are you gonna do now fast forward 15 years and i can find in that moment the beginnings of my career of my relationships the beginnings of what keeps me up at night what i teach my daughter the books i choose to read i can find the beginnings of who i am as a 32 year old adult in that one single moment of terror and passion and conviction that swelled inside of me as i walked through those sliding doors into the sticky heat of a bangkok afternoon i was alone abroad with about 32 to my name and i was operating on sheer gut instinct there's a lot of work that's been done to understand instinct scientists have noticed that when test subjects are shown dozens of numbers flashed on a screen too fast for them to memorize or do any kind of arithmetic more than 90 percent can still say which side of the screen would add up to a higher number in that same way we've all had the experience of looking up when someone across the room is looking at us those are simple evolutionary instincts developed over time to help us survive the ability to judge which food source has more and which has less without counting the ability to identify and evade a predator and they're important but the moment of instinct i was following as i walked away from that gate was a different more subjective kind a judgment that might have been right for me while being wrong for somebody else and that kind of instinct draws on a lifetime of accumulated experiences that are all quietly stashed away in our subconscious and broken down into chunks and over time as we're all busy living our lives those chunks of experience begin to repeat themselves in fundamental but often imperceptible patterns and it's those patterns that this kind of instinct can search and draw conclusions from when your conscious mind might not even know they exist when i walked through those sliding doors i thought i was doing something groundbreaking something completely different from anything i'd ever done in my life up till that point but the instinct to do it was really strong and the reason it was strong is because it wasn't all that groundbreaking after all my mother was an actress and a poet and taught me from my earliest memories to seek out new experiences and new environments and i had an ample opportunity to do it because i moved every year of my childhood my dad on the other hand was an economist and an entrepreneur and instilled in me this deep love for writing plans and building organizations and challenging the status quo if i hadn't already admitted my age i think the computer would have done it for me i have this strong memory of being on holiday with my mother in morocco and she extended the trip spontaneously and in the week that followed both of us embarked on friendships that came to be really important to us later in life now none of those random data points about my life occurred to me in the moment that i decided to stay but they did occur to my subconscious somewhere deep in my inner brain circuitry a program ran that identified what was necessary to stay adaptability comfort in foreign environments comfort with uncertainty some ability to budget money a desire to meet new people and see things through to fruition and off it went crunching through every experience and reaction and outcome of my six thousand 6492 of odd days on the planet and the output from all those millions of inputs was don't get on that plane now would i have come to the same conclusion if i'd sat down cross-legged on the carpet in the airport and written a list of pros and cons maybe but probably not because like those test subjects with the numbers flashing on the screen there were too many millions of inputs for my conscious mind to process that's where the subconscious mind kicks in and i'm here to submit to you that it's smarter than you are or at least smarter than i was that day 15 years ago so i walked out through the sliding doors and i found my way to a long distance overnight bus and i pitched up the next morning in mesat which is a tiny town on the thai burmese border and i went to a refugee camp that was near one we'd volunteered at on the trip put me to work i just need a place to sleep and over the year that followed i came to know many of the families that lived in that camp and to spend time in their homes and with their children and on their playing fields and in the time that i was there i also came to know a number of them that had sustained terrible injuries as a result of land mines along the border or at the hands of the military regime across the border in burma alongside them i came to be really good friends with a small group of burmese political dissidents young men mainly who had come across the border mainly because there were death sentences on their head on the other side and they were living in a tree house on the thai side of the border publishing the irawadi which is the democratic newspaper in opposition to peacefully document the crimes and the abuses that they had witnessed now at first they blindfolded me when they took me to this treehouse but over time we became friends and eventually we planned together to go into burma and film an interview with aung sun tzu chi winner of the nobel peace prize who at the time was still under house arrest in the burmese capital of rangoon now as the only member of this tribe that had not already run away from rangoon at the hands of the government i was the natural candidate to take the trip but to do that i needed a business visa because as part of its closing to the world burma had stopped issuing student visas had stopped issuing tourist visas and as a 17 year old kid living on the border i wasn't sure how i was going to go about getting one until i remembered an english investment banker named daryl who i had met for an hour a year earlier at a burma conference in london i knew he was passionate about burmese democracy and about filmmaking and i was pretty sure that because of his work he had a better shot than i did at getting a business visa so i called him collect from the thai burmese border and said here's what we're up to would you consider taking three weeks off work getting on a plane coming to thailand so that we can pretend to be married and go into burma on your business visa which seemed reasonable at the time and to daryl's eternal credit he did exactly that so he landed in bangkok and we went to khaosan road where you can get forged anything and got a forged marriage certificate we bought nivea face creams to sink film in and bic pens to wrap film around and we cut holes in our satchel so we could film while we were cycling and on september 15th of 1999 we spent the afternoon with aung san tsuchi in rangoon talking about burmese democracy and the future that she envisioned for her country now even though we knew we would get arrested when we left that building which we did we eventually managed to get the majority of that film out of burma unscathed and the bbc radio was able to broadcast it back into burma on shortwave so that sushi's constituents could hear her speak openly and freely two weeks after i left burma i started at oxford not because i had chosen one of the two options i had at the beginning of this story but because i'd found a completely different path in life altogether one focused on international relations and human rights peace and security and while i was there i traveled back and forth to southeast asia back to burma in fact and to east timor as a writer and a journalist and that same path took me to the school of foreign service at georgetown where i studied international security and to a career working seven years in counterterrorism for the us government at home and overseas i run a web startup committed to supporting global nonprofits through the cash that we all spend shopping online it's the most authentically me life that i ever could have found and i never would have found it at the end of a list of pros and cons so now as the mama of a four-year-old wild coyote cub who was born in china and stopped strangers on the street to dance london bridge i find myself profoundly grateful to know that she and that all of us however different our lives and whatever choices we face have within ourselves this superpower this wise man under the banyan tree this oracle of delphi we call intuition so when your instinct tells you to do something unreasonable something off the beaten path have faith that somewhere deep in your history there are patterns that make you uniquely qualified to take the leap take it with both feet you have no idea where it may lead but wherever it does i promise you you'll come back with plenty of ideas worth spreading

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 48,818

Keywords: ted talk, \We Are Family Foundation\, \United States Government\, Counterterrorism, ted talks, Thailand, \Amaryllis Fox\, Government, \Nile Rodgers\, Burma, \Aung San Suu Kyi\, tedx talks, ted, tedx, tedx talk, ted x, \Think Global School\, Instinct

Id: hcmwNCOUVsQ

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2013