For those of you who didn’t have to read Julius Caesar in high school (or those of you who did and subsequently forgot all about it), the Ides of March referred to date of March 15th. In the beginning of William Shakespeare’s play, a sage warns Julius Caesar to “beware the Ides of March,” which later becomes the day he is assassinated.

The sage’s warning to Caesar is referred to as foreshadowing in literary terms, when a character’s words or actions allude to a future event. In the non-literary world, however, foreshadowing is usually not a term used when a person may appear to ”predict” the future. We usually classify those musings as premonitions, intuition, or even forms of extra-sensory perception. We may also classify people who make such predictions as crazy or paranoid.

Sometimes, we refer to a “gut feeling,” an unexplainable inkling that something is not quite right. Anecdotal evidence may include tales of people who took an alternate route to work for no apparent reason but later discover they avoided a major traffic accident or other catastrophe. At times, we scoff these instances off as being coincidental or happenstance, but could it be we all have a mental radar that alerts us “to beware the (metaphorical) Ides of March”?

What do you think? Are we wired to sense danger through our natural evolutionary progression, or is there another explanation? Could it be we all have inner sage, warning us of impending doom? Or am I just rambling like a crazy person?

On another subject, there is the old saying that March is “in like a lion and out like a lamb,” referring to the weather and the beginning of Spring later this week. If March starts like lion and ends like a lamb, then what would the Ides of March be (perhaps a fox, raccoon, or a moose with a bad attitude)?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Bitter/Sweet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.