How Do Elephants Know Where to Go?

It was cold up the roof of a Tel Aviv hotel. There were only three of us left that late at night -- Itay, Dana, and myself. A tiny heater from one of the rooms was enough to keep us going a little bit longer.

It's only with a few people around Itay when he starts talking about the really interesting stuff. After he got going, I asked a random question that I was wondering about for a while. How do elephants know where to go?

I've heard stories about elephants migrating hundrends of kilometers, taking a very specific path. How do they navigate? Stars? Earth's magnetism? Maybe they rememebr that tree in the corner after 300 miles? But then, what if it's gone?

Itay frankly didn't know the answer to that, so he said: "They're elephants. They just know". As hand-wavy as it seems, Itay does know the answers to questions he doesn't know the answers to.

We have moved on to other topics, then Dana told us how she's nervous about something, but that "it'll be fine". Israelis say that a lot. "יהיה בסדר", pronounced "Yi-hi-ye Be-se-der" is used in Israel as an optimistic outlook to an issue one's facing. Literally "it'll be fine", I considered (and still mostly consider) it to be the most useless, sometime dangerous attitude there is. How can one do nothing and expect things to work out? Action and non-action must be rationally considered.

I expressed my concerns with "יהיה בסדר", and urged Dana to maybe put some more thought into how she's going to achieve whatever it was. Itay, however, thought differently. He said that people tend to work things out. When I asked him how do they know what to do without proper process, he replied: "How do elephants know where to go?"

I have taken that wisdom with me ever since, and it serves me well. Truly great things happened after I went the longer, sometimes unresonable, route, when I avoided the elevator or when I took my sweet, sweet time even though I was late. All because I have started listening to that voice in my head telling me to put reasoning aside, just for a little bit.

That doesn't mean I've forgone logic, far from it. I am still very much reason-driven, but I acknowledge that there are invisible faults in my deductions or assumptions, and I've learned to count on whatever primal notion I have in my brain that can detect these faults. It may not be obvious, but being reason-driven helps intuition. It's much easier to be intuitive in contrast to competing reason rather than in a muddle of unexplainable hunches.

As for how do elephants know where to go... I guess it doesn't really matter anymore, does it?