The turtle effect: retreat first; the wisdom comes after.
Today we start something new. We’re spending our time these next six days with the energy of She Remembers Out Loud.
This is the voice of “I remember.” This is remembering with a purpose, not remembering just to remember. This is pulling the hidden lesson out of what you’ve lived and handing it forward to someone who needs it. The She Remembers Out Loud energy gets wiser with time. It collects experience the way some people collect stamps or Pokémon cards, and it knows that every hard thing you’ve lived through was building toward something you’ll pass on.
But here’s the part that trips people up. This energy is about the retreat you need to make before you remember. After something happens to you, the She Remembers Out Loud energy needs a pause, real time alone, before it can turn that experience into wisdom instead of just noise. If you skip the retreat, the lesson never fully forms.
I find this energy shows up most in my more painful memories. The more something hurts, the more time I need to process what happened. I call it my turtle effect. When I’m hurt, I retreat into my shell. Once I’ve processed things and pulled out the lesson, I come back out.
I had a stretch of my teaching career where a new department chair took over, and from the moment he did, things got hard. I had just won a teaching award that was voted on entirely by students. I was proven in the classroom, reliable, respected. The next semester, I wasn’t put on the schedule. When I asked why, I was told I wasn’t needed, even though four other people ended up covering an overload because I wasn’t there. One week I was being honored for my teaching. The next, I had lost the job in that discipline.
Man, did I retreat! I needed real time to process and reflect. In the end, it pushed me to develop new skills and expand my teaching into an entirely different discipline. But it took me a while to get to where I could see the lesson.
There’s a song that perfectly captures this energy: Mike and the Mechanics, “The Living Years.” It’s about the wisdom we carry and the cost of not sharing it while there’s still time for it to matter to someone. That’s the heart of this energy right there. Sometimes, what you know is only worth something once it’s handed forward. The Living Years
Over the next few days, we’re going to look at all sides of this energy. What happens when the retreat gets totally skipped. What it looks like when you build real space for reflection into your everyday life. And what it looks like at its very best, when your wisdom carries a weight people can feel before you’ve even said a word.
Find your happy. Love what you do. Make a difference. Come back to me safely. See ya!
