The Conversations Between Things

I used to think I was collecting knowledge. Looking back, I think I was listening to the same conversation in different languages.

Some conversations begin long before we realize we're listening.

Lately, I’ve been waking somewhere between two and four in the morning.

Not every night.

Just often enough that the routine has become familiar.

A hot flash.

A glance at the clock.

Then a few quiet minutes while my body settles back down.

I’ve stopped fighting those moments.

Instead, I’ve started noticing where my mind goes while I wait.

Years ago, while studying Traditional Chinese Medicine, I learned about the organ clock. Every organ was believed to have a window when its energy was most active. Somewhere in the middle of the night belonged the liver.

I hadn’t thought about that until perimenopause started waking me up there.

Now I find myself wondering less whether it’s true than why that piece of information resurfaced after all this time.

That seems to be happening more often now.

Not just with Traditional Chinese Medicine.

With life.

Looking back, I realize my curiosity has been remarkably consistent.

From the time I was young, I was drawn to movement, the healing arts, the body, and the quiet ways people help one another heal.

Massage therapy became my profession because it gave me something I desperately wanted at the time: autonomy. I could support myself, work with my hands, help people, and leave each day knowing someone walked out feeling better than when they arrived.

Curiosity led me deeper into Traditional Chinese Medicine, where I studied gua sha, Tai Chi, qigong, and a completely different way of understanding the body.

Later came Pilates.

Years after that, writing led me toward fascia, the nervous system, lymphatics, longevity, regenerative medicine, and more books, conversations, and rabbit holes than I could count.

Life pulled my career in different directions.

My curiosity kept returning to the same questions.

For years, those experiences lived in separate folders in my mind.

Only now are they beginning to talk to each other.

Not because someone convinced me they belonged together.

Because enough time has passed for lived experience to begin introducing them.

I remember the liver clock.

My body feels stiff and I think about fascia.

One comes from an ancient system of observation.

The other from a field modern science is only beginning to understand.

What keeps pulling me forward isn’t deciding who’s right.

It’s noticing the conversations that happen when very different ways of seeing the world unexpectedly nod at one another.

Walking changes my mood in ways I once would’ve dismissed as coincidence.

A lymphatic massage shifts something that’s difficult to measure but easy to feel.

I’m impatiently waiting for a new set of tuning forks to arrive—not because I think they’ll solve anything, but because I’m curious enough to keep exploring.

The older I get, the less interested I become in declaring one system right and another wrong.

Western medicine has given us extraordinary insights.

Ancient traditions preserved observations gathered over centuries.

Modern neuroscience continues to reshape how we understand stress, pain, and recovery.

Each illuminates something.

None illuminates everything.

When I was younger, I thought I was collecting knowledge.

Now I think I was collecting conversations.

Not conversations with other people.

Conversations between ideas.

Ideas separated by centuries.

And, every so often, conversations with the person I used to be.

After enough years in the same body, you collect your own data.

Not enough to prove everything.

Just enough to keep asking better questions.

Maybe that’s what changes with time.

Not that we suddenly know more.

But that the conversations become easier to hear.

The body speaks to memory.

Experience speaks to knowledge.

Curiosity speaks to wisdom.

The things we once thought were separate quietly begin introducing themselves to one another.

All content and concepts ©Meggen Harris. No reproduction without permission.