The Lessons of Resonance
Yo-yos and answers to long-lasting questions.
Our son really wanted a yo-yo.
Well, he had one a few years ago, then it found its way to the land of misplaced toys.
I think he recently saw someone with a yo-yo on a show that he loves so it rekindled his desire for this thing.
So, we got him a new yo-yo.
A week or two later, it found its way to the land of misplaced toys.
Now he wants a basketball.
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Have you ever found yourself thinking about something so much that it’s all you can think about, then a few days later, you can’t even remember what the thing was?
Conversely, have you also noticed that it’s been several years since something happened and it still finds its way into your thoughts from time to time? I’m not necessarily referring to grief or something overly powerful, I’m actually talking about something smaller. About the weight of a metaphorical yo-yo.
Different things resonate differently.
I’d like to explore two characteristics of resonance itself and suggest that of the two, one is more important than the other.
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Imagine the sound of a gong.
There are two things I want you to pay particular attention to:
How loud was the sound you were imagining?
How long did the sound last?
These are the two characteristics of resonance that I’d like to explore. Volume and duration.
If you find your thoughts consumed by something on a given day, that thing is resonating for you at a high volume. It’s a loud gong. But, once you sleep on it, if you find that the volume has gotten quieter, then it’s likely that the duration is going to be short. Perhaps in a few days you would have forgotten about it entirely. This is a high volume short duration pattern of resonance.
This is our son’s yo-yo.
Then there’s the thing that enters your mind occasionally. It could be just days old or several years old, but it keeps coming up. Volume in this case may have been high or low, but the more important factor is duration. It’s long. When something has a long duration, it meets you at different points in your life, and colours those points accordingly.
Of the two characteristics that make up resonance, duration is the more important one. When you add up all the little moments of influence that something with long duration has, it will dwarf something that has a high volume.
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So, we’ve answered the question of importance. If something resonates with us for a longer period of time—regardless of how loud it initially was—it’s more important than something that consumes our thoughts for a brief window of time.
The question we haven’t explored is why certain things have a longer duration of resonance.
I’d like to suggest a simple answer. One you can test for yourself.
If something has been resonating with you for some time, perhaps years, it’s because it’s teaching you something.
It may be a lesson that you need to keep remembering. It may be a lesson that you haven’t quite mastered yet and so the teacher keeps showing up at different points in your life in the hopes that you’ll keep making progress.
If school has taught us anything, in order to learn the lesson we have to do something. We have to show that we have learned.
So the question I will leave you with, dear reader, is this:
Of the things that are resonating in your life right now, what will you do about them?
p.s. This post pairs well with something I wrote about several years ago: Sympathetic Resonance.