Have you ever made a decision that didn’t feel planned or thought-out, just…necessary? The kind of thing that happens too often to be a coincidence: a last-minute adjustment, a different turn, a choice made for no other reason that simply because of having a feeling.

Lately, I have noticed just how often that feeling comes first. I move before I understand why. It is strange how right that split moment feels. I decide to take the longer way home, put a little more effort into how I look than I originally planned, or answer a phone call at a very inconvenient moment. They’re small decisions, seemingly irrelevant and barely conscious, but somehow, they always end the same way – with a moment of clarity. The longer way home makes me run into someone I haven’t seen in months. I have an unexpected encounter that makes my extra effort getting ready pay off. The phone call ends up being the last time my grandfather ever called me.

There is absolutely no way I could have known any of those outcomes beforehand. And yet, once they happened, the feeling suddenly makes sense. That’s when it clicks – why I went that way, why I reapplied my lip-gloss during the day, why I picked up the phone in the middle of class. The feeling that “didn’t have a reason” when I made my decision turns out to have had one all along – I just wasn’t in on it. It is like something inside me keeps saying: do this now, you’ll understand later. And I always listen to it, no questions asked.

This feeling that keeps coming up is what we call intuition – the sensation that shows up without a reason and only makes sense in hindsight. However, we seem to use the word as a shortcut to wave away the unexplainable and avoid unpacking our experience. It is as if giving it a name is equivalent to being handed an explanation. With intuition, this is definitely not the case. The more you try to untangle the logic behind it, the more it seems like a never-ending, inconsistent loop: the body moves, the understanding catches up, and just as the reason becomes clear, the certainty that made the body move in the first place slips back out of reach.

With that realization, the mind lingers on the origin of that certainty. Is it something explainable and purely scientific, a subconscious conclusion based on small observations and pattern recognition? This might be the case with the countless small, forgettable choices of everyday life, but the feeling I mean is something rarer. Stronger. Something closer to other magic-like things humans do without thinking, like reading a room the moment you walk into it or forming an impression of someone within the first few seconds of meeting them. Not impressions built through interaction, but the kind that arrive instantly: the unplaceable sense that someone is not to be trusted or the quiet certainty that makes you lower your guard around a stranger you have only just met. It feels as if the body knows before any further interaction has taken place, committing to a judgement the mind has not yet learned how to justify. These are the moments we trust instinctively because they come out of nowhere with such strength, overwhelming us with the urge to act in a way that feels unmistakably right (see my article “The Weight of a Glance”, Season 2, Issue 7 of N/A.)

Whatever the answer is, I don’t think I want to know it. After all, the more we know about it, the weaker its power over us becomes – and at that point, it loses its purpose.

What this leaves me with isn’t an answer about intuition, but a new and intriguing perspective on our behaviour. We’re used to treating clarity as a condition for action, as if knowing should always come first, only to be followed by the action once everything is understood. But intuition disrupts that order. It suggests that explanation doesn’t always lead the way: sometimes it is not the starting point, but the finish line. And that is exactly how it is supposed to work.