The Light That Was Already There
Remembering, Part Two
Flora’s story happened on a quiet Sunday afternoon in a nursing home garden, and it was the kind of moment that stops you completely and leaves a mark long after it has passed. But most of Remembering doesn’t arrive that way — luminous and singular, impossible to miss. Most of it happens on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of an unremarkable day, in a driveway after a scraped knee.
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Tom had been carrying something since our last session, and I noticed it the moment he walked in. He was quieter than usual — not with the closed, careful quiet of his earlier visits, but with something more open and uncertain, the quality of a person who has been sitting with a question he doesn’t quite know how to ask.
“Something happened this week,” he said. “I keep coming back to it, and I’m not sure what to do with it.”
His eight-year-old son Jake had fallen off his bike. Nothing serious — a scraped knee, some tears, the ordinary catastrophe of childhood. Jake had come running across the yard toward Tom, and Tom had held him. Simple. Unremarkable. Over in a few minutes.
Except that Tom couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“Jake came running right to me,” he said. “He needed me. And I just stayed. I held him longer than I probably needed to. I wasn’t thinking about what came next, or how to fix the knee, or what time it was. I was just there with him.” He stopped, something working in him. “It wasn’t what I did. It was how I felt — like something in me had been waiting a long time to do exactly that.”
He paused before adding something quieter. “But I don’t think I ever did that with my father. Ran to him. Let him hold me like that. I don’t think I ever believed he would stay.”
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I want to stay with what Tom was describing, because it was not simply a parenting moment or a tender memory, however much it was also both of those things. He was describing something he had felt not just in his mind but in his chest, his arms, somewhere beneath thought — a knowing that didn’t come from strategy or from reading the room or from calculating what a good father should do in that moment. He had spent days turning it over mentally, trying to understand it, and kept arriving at the same quiet recognition: thinking your way through a moment like that only gets you so far. Some knowing lives deeper than the mind can reach, in the body, in the gut, in the heart.
“It felt more like me,” he said slowly, “than anything has in a long time.” He paused again, reaching for something. “And it felt like love — not something I was trying to give, just love, moving through me.”
What moved through Tom in that driveway was not something he had manufactured or earned or performed. It came from a part of him that doesn’t explain itself or consult a manual, a part that simply knew — not only what to do, but how to be. How to stay. How to let the moment be exactly what it was.
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Once Tom started reflecting and remembering, he realized that Jake in the driveway was not the first time this had happened. There had been a dinner party years earlier, before he and Sarah were together, when he had looked at her across a crowded table and felt something he couldn’t quite name — not the familiar process of figuring someone out or calculating whether she liked him, but a simple recognition, one part of him meeting something in her without needing to analyze it. He had filed that moment away as falling for someone and moved on without thinking much more about it.
There was also a morning not long ago when he had been driving to work along the same route he had taken for years, barely noticing it, when a song came on the radio — a song his father used to play. He drove past his exit. Not because he was distracted, but because for a few minutes he had been somewhere else entirely, somewhere quieter, somewhere that felt, for reasons he could not explain, like home. And just weeks before our session, a thought had arrived while he was driving: call your mother today. He had nearly let it pass. He was busy, and the thought seemed to come from nowhere. But something made him pull over and call her, and it turned out she had needed to hear from someone that morning.
He had written all of these off as coincidences or flukes, nice moments that didn’t add up to anything significant. But sitting with them in our session, he could see what they had in common. In every one of them, something truer than his familiar self had moved through him — the self that reads rooms and manages tension and keeps everything running smoothly. Something quieter and more essentially his own had been briefly, unmistakably present.
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Most of us move through our lives in a well-practiced way that Tom knows intimately. He reads the room. He calculates. He asks what the situation requires, what is safe, what is expected of him. He manages and strategizes and keeps the peace, and he is genuinely good at all of it — these capacities kept him functional through decades of difficulty, and they carry real gifts. But they operate from the outside in, taking their cues from what is happening around him rather than from what is true within him.
There is another way of moving that is quieter and less practiced and harder to name. This deeper part of Tom has occasionally broken through without warning or explanation: he held Jake without consulting a manual, he recognized Sarah without analyzing her, he pulled over and called his mother and waited to be heard. These were not moments he planned or chose in the usual sense. They were moments when something more essentially himself was briefly guiding things — when the true self, as I call it in The Inner Lighthouse, made itself known.
Remembering is the slow, ongoing process of learning to recognize that presence. It means noticing when it has been there, trusting it a little more each time it speaks, and gradually building a relationship with the part of yourself that has always known more than your familiar strategies could access.
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Near the end of our session, Tom said something I have been sitting with since. “These moments,” he said quietly. “They’ve been happening my whole life, haven’t they. I just didn’t know what I was touching when I touched them.”
Yes. That is exactly right. The true self has been present the whole time — in the moments of unexpected clarity, the thoughts that arrived from nowhere, the choices that surprised you, the times you responded from somewhere deeper than habit or strategy or fear. You were not accessing something new in those moments. You were remembering something old, something that has never left, something that was there before the versions you created to survive and belong and stay safe, and that has remained present beneath them ever since.
Remembering is not a destination you reach or a task you complete. It is a capacity you develop slowly and imperfectly, with many returns to the familiar. It begins with noticing — with looking back at the moments you dismissed as coincidences or flukes and asking what might have actually been present in them. It deepens with curiosity and patience, with the willingness to sit with a question rather than rush toward an answer. And it opens, gradually, into the recognition that the presence you have been touching in your best moments is not occasional or accidental. It is who you are, moving through you whenever you become available to it — not only in nursing home gardens on sacred Sunday afternoons, but in driveways and cars and at dinner tables, in all the ordinary moments that turn out, on closer inspection, to be anything but.
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Reflection Questions
Think of a recent moment when you acted from somewhere you didn’t fully recognize — when something in you simply knew what to do or how to be. What was that experience like, and what do you make of it now?
What moments in your life have you written off as coincidences or flukes? If you looked at them differently, what might you discover?
What is the difference, in your body, between the familiar self that reads rooms and manages situations and the quieter presence that occasionally moves without explanation?
When have you felt most essentially yourself — not most successful, not most productive, but most truly you?
What would it mean to trust that quieter presence a little more?
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An Invitation
If this is resonating with you, I’d love to have you join me for the Inner Lighthouse monthly workshop, which meets on the second Tuesday of every month from 1 to 2 PM Eastern on Zoom.
Our July workshop is coming up on July 14, and the topic is Awakening — the first of the five movements of The Inner Lighthouse and the natural starting place for this journey. Each month we explore one movement together, and you are welcome to attend one session or many, since each stands on its own.
July 14, 2026 | Second Tuesdays monthly | 1–2 PM Eastern | Zoom | $20
Complimentary for Inner Lighthouse community members.
To register, simply email me at kittyfallon@me.com and I will send you everything you need.
The lighthouse shines for whoever is navigating the sea. 🕯️
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Next in The Inner Lighthouse: We go deeper into the versions we created — exploring not just what they protected us from, but the full ecosystem of thoughts, feelings, and patterns they carry, and what becomes possible when we begin to see them clearly.
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Kathleen “Kitty” Fallon, PhD is the coach and developer of The Inner Lighthouse — a coaching, writing, and community ecosystem built around the central question: What does it mean to navigate life from the light within — and to share that light in service of a world that needs it? To learn more or to join The Harbor or The Lantern Room community, email kittyfallon@me.com.