We sometimes call it intuition, but it’s really the sum of inherited and lived experience telling you what matters right now.

Descartes formulated what became the foundation of the modern world: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. But what happened to the body in that sentence? What happened to the heart, the breath, the pulse?

what happens to a feeling that has no word? It doesn’t disappear, but it becomes invisible. And when it can’t be expressed, it opens a distance between me and everything around me.

We’ve lost vocabulary for the complex, the not-yet-formed, the things that aren’t yes or no. The things that are both grief and relief. Love and frustration. Our modern language rewards clarity, speed, unambiguity. But life is rarely binary. It’s contradictory, uneven, full of in-betweens. The things that matter most are hard to say - and even

in that silence - where the words remain but contact is gone - something essential fades.

I think about how this shows up at work. How we learn to say “challenging” when we mean “impossible”, “an exciting opportunity” when we mean “a crisis”, “feedback” when we mean criticism that hurts. As if the real words were too dangerous to use.

And humans? We’re no different - only more complex. Our language was born to bind us together, to keep us alive. At first it was a rhythm between mouths and bodies reading danger before thought had time to form. A tone that soothed an infant, a touch that softened the pulse, scents that signalled safety or threat. The first words were likely sounds

We need words for the in-between spaces. For the process. For what isn’t finished yet. For the complex things we can still feel. For what takes time. For what simply is.

Language works when two people’s associations overlap enough. When their worlds drift too far apart, it falters. We hear the same words, but they spark different images. The conversation comes undone. We think we’re communicating with words, but we’re really communicating our entire worlds.

When a society loses its shared stories, it also loses its