Resonance, Memory, and Intuition
Reflecting on My Year of Expansion
It’s been a big year.
It feels like I’m re-claiming joy one relationship at a time…starting with myself.
I hit 10 years of marriage (and it’s better than ever!), re-negotiated my relationship with my day job, launched a side business, published several articles through Medium and Substack, started non-fiction and fiction manuscripts, and uncovered a more joyful sense of physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
Along with my own expansion, I’ve seen it with the people I love. My wife’s pilot career has continued to materialize, which is the product of a lifelong dream. Our kids distinct personalities are blossoming and they are, objectively and obviously, the most lovable humans on the planet.
We’re more connected as this little family of five than we’ve ever been. We’ve cleared and cleaned, upgraded and expanded, simplified and clarified, and challenged each other every day… which has led us to evolve through love, attention, and intention.
Somehow it feels like these changes are only a beginning: Seeding roots for a new way of being and branching into our not-too-distant future.
A tree’s growth is reflected in concentric circles that ripple out from the center.
I was taught that you could count a tree’s rings starting at the center to see its growth, that each year of the tree’s life is represented by a ring as you count outward. To find “McKinley’s growth at 35” you’d count 35 rings out, starting at the center.
It seems intuitive that life begins at the center with “birth” and at ends at some mysterious point with “death.” We travel along a nice linear path forming memories and having experiences along the way. Our memories and experiences harden like the rings formed on a tree, holding sacred the life that was, just as it was.
From this perspective our growth occurs at the outer edges of a life that’s been lived, defined by prior choices and experiences.
Life is teaching me that this is backwards.
We are always at the center, McKinley at 35 would be found in the same place as McKinley at any other point. As we expand, grow, or change we gently push outward.
Life begins and ends “now” where all that is is available.
The echoes of our current expansion ripple through our “prior” years and shape opportunities for a future that is yet to be.
These recent choices (starting my business, publishing on these platforms, my wife completing her lifelong dream of becoming a pilot, renewing relationships) reach through past and future experience.
If I didn’t expand this year in the ways described, the pieces of my past that have re-materialized would have remained undisturbed. Left alone as relics of a bygone past or as dormant seeds awaiting future expansion.
Which may be one in the same–each relic a seed of potential awaiting its incarnation into fresh form.
Old beliefs, choices, or experiences that seemed at the time to have led me away from who I am, become inherent pieces of who I was always meant to be.
Other beliefs, choices, or experiences that seemed to define who I am are released, forgiven, integrated, or healed.
What was once a set-back becomes a leap forward.
This is the reality of resonance.
Perhaps our experiences are resonant waves rather than stagnant rings. That all that is is available here and now–including our past and future.
Current information, beliefs, experiences, and choices resonate with past and future beliefs, experiences, and choices available beyond our perceptual limitations (including the perception that our past and future are separate from here and now).
If this concept represents anything real, our memory and intuition may be two sides of the same coin. Consider their experiential similarities. Memory and intuition are best defined by how they feel rather than what they are.
Memory pulls us into a dream-like realm that feels familiar, albeit ghostly. Intuition taps into something known beyond thought, equally familiar and ghostlike.
Memory, as a tool of perception, offers us a malleable belief of what has been. Intuition, as a tool of perception, offers us a malleable belief of what may be.
Either way, you just had to be there.
If memory and intuition are two expressions of one resonant field, many questions and possibilities arise:
- What if intuition is feeling into what has already happened, in our future?
- What if memory is feeling into what may still take place, in our past?
- To remember is to re-claim experience, here and now.
- To intuit is to lay claim to what may be, here and now.
- When we feel the pull of hope or insight, driven by our intuition, we are remembering what is yet to be.
- When we feel the tug of nostalgia or past pain, driven by memory, we are intuiting a change that is meant to be.
- Memory is not a “storage” of past events, it’s a dormant seed that’s waiting to bloom into a form that aligns with our current life.
- Intuition is not a “prediction” of the future, it’s branch of the future that’s already taken shape, rooted in our current life.
Or, maybe their similarity is just an illusion of perception.
Either way, I am grateful for the expansion in my little family throughout this past year. It’s restructuring my past and future in ways that I can only feel into–beautiful, mysterious, and full.
One day I’ll look back on this year and these choices will be resurrected by new experiences. They’ll be familiar but re-purposed to align with the new story.
My hope is that the story of 2024 will be even more beautiful when it’s reclaimed by my future self.
From what I remember, that’s how it will go, with my intuition guiding what’s already been.
May we honor our permanent place at the center of all that is.
