The Knock That Won’t Go Away

Hi there,

When we are very young, most of us don’t have a big separation between “me” and “what I’m meant to do.”

We just… are.

We play the way we want to play.
We move the way we want to move.
We ask questions if we’re curious, make things if we feel like making things.

There’s often a kind of effortless connection to what feels true and alive.

For many of us, that’s when we first felt some version of a calling — long before we had language for it:

The kid who was always making up dances or stories.
The kid who lined up stuffed animals to “teach” them.
The kid who organized everyone on the playground.
The kid who sat quietly, noticing everything.

If you think back, you might remember something you were drawn to, over and over, before anyone told you whether it was valuable or practical.

And then… we grow.

We start to get messages:

Be practical.
Be realistic.
That’s a nice hobby, but what are you really going to do?
This is what success looks like.
This is who you should be.

Slowly, that original connection gets… covered.

Not destroyed. Just layered over.

By expectations. By roles. By survival.

Sometimes we stop hearing the knock because there’s so much noise around it.

Sometimes we still hear it — but we learn to override it, to explain it away, to promise ourselves we’ll get to it “later.”

I want to name something:

The knock doesn’t always feel romantic or obvious.

Sometimes it’s a clear draw: I want to make this. I want to go there. I want to try that.

But just as often, it shows up as:

• A sense of I can’t keep doing it like this anymore.
• A low-level restlessness that doesn’t go away.
• A wave of emotion at a performance, or a book, or a conversation — something that feels bigger than the moment itself.
• A quiet jealousy when we see someone else doing what we secretly long for.

It’s that sense of: something in me is asking for more truth, more alignment, more honesty.

From my point of view, that’s not random.

That’s the part of you connected to something Eternal — something larger than your roles or your resume — asking to be heard again.

We can ignore it for a long time. Many of us do.

We can negotiate with it, make it smaller, explain it away.

But it tends to keep knocking.

Not to punish us.

To invite us back to ourselves.

You don’t have to know what it means yet.

You don’t have to have answers or a plan.

You just have to be a little bit willing to listen.

And sometimes, the body is the best way to do that.

Before we had coaching and therapy and self-help books, we had rhythm, breath, gesture, ritual. The body knows things before the mind catches up. Sometimes what we can’t say in words can move in a shape, or a weight, or a direction.