Yesterday I listened to Lisa Kudrow (yes, Phoebe from Friends) on Mayim Bialik's podcast reflecting on the days after her mother's death. She shared a series of strange experiences, from family members waking unexpectedly the night her mother passed to messages appearing on her phone that she didn't remember typing.

Her stories reminded me the night my father died, 1:07am, when my husband, who never wakes in the middle of the night, got out of bed after our cat stirred him. As he crossed our bedroom, he noticed my silenced phone glowing on my desk. It was my stepmother calling with the news. Neither of us has ever been able to explain why he decided to get up at that exact moment.

Listening to Kudrow, I realized we'd probably been asking the wrong question and we needed to reframe it to: what if we trusted the information arriving instead of arguing with the mechanism behind it?

That idea stayed with me as the conversation eventually turned to people who seem "tuned to a different frequency". The kinds of people other cultures might call healers or shamans and whether that ability can be cultivated.

That idea of tuning in rather than figuring everything out has been on my mind a lot lately.

I met Christie when I was twenty-two at a mutual friend's house in Lake Tahoe. Within the first hour, I knew we'd be lifelong friends. We were roommates in San Francisco in our mid-twenties before life pulled us in different directions: hers went to the Peace Corps in Haiti, then Zambia, then eventually Bainbridge Island with her husband and two daughters. Every time we've visited each other since, the result is the same. We laugh until we cry while our husbands and kids look on, amused by a friendship that picks up exactly where it left off. Which is why what happened two weeks ago didn't feel entirely random.

I came across an Instagram post from journalist Brooke Baldwin. She was hanging a piece of art created by an artist who collaborates with the Pacific Ocean, letting the tides shape each work on a Bainbridge Island beach. Instantly I thought of Christie. I wondered how she was doing. I thought about reaching out, but it was late. Tomorrow, I told myself, and then I forgot. The next day, my phone lit up with a text from Christie: "Hey lady! You keep popping into my head for some reason so I thought I should say hi. How are you guys?" We hadn't spoken in over a year.

Christie listened to the tap on the shoulder. I didn’t.

Was it a coincidence? Maybe. But it was worth pausing to notice how often we dismiss these quiet nudges. Not every nudge can be explained. What matters is whether we're paying attention enough to notice them in the first place and then act on them. We've grown so accustomed to the low hum of noise in our lives that we've forgotten how to tune in.

We talk about "finding our frequency" as if it's hidden somewhere waiting to be discovered. But frequencies aren't manufactured; they're detected. Radio stations don't begin broadcasting because you turn the dial. They were already there. Turning the dial simply changes what you're able to receive.

Last June, Nik McRae led an offering where he had a group of us breathe together, in and out, a few times. Then he moved into toning, low vocal sounds meant to shift the energy in the room. It was just enough to get everyone in the room onto the same wavelength, quite literally. Then he talked about bandwidth: a range of frequencies capable of carrying a signal. He suggested we're all transmitting and receiving emotionally, but most of us are poorly calibrated. So little of how we communicate is verbal; most of it is tone, timing, a gesture, the look in someone's eye or a smile on someone's face. So much of what we call miscommunication isn't about words at all. It's static, two people on slightly different frequencies, each one certain their signal came through clean. Most of what we call an argument is really just two people slightly out of sync, both convinced the other one isn't listening.

He used whales as an example: those long, low calls moving for miles through open water, no wires, no towers, just frequency finding frequency across an enormous distance. Sometimes, with people we're close to, it works the same way. You think of someone out of nowhere, and a day later, there they are in your email, on a text or perhaps even right in front of you. Not because you summoned them. Maybe the water was carrying the signal and they happened to notice.

I've realized my children often respond less to my words than to the emotional frequency carrying them. The sentence "Come inside" can feel like an invitation or more often a demand depending on the signal underneath it.

This summer, my own frequency hasn't matched my kids'. Somewhere in June, the tuning slipped. My boys caught World Cup fever, transforming our backyard into a soccer pitch. Every afternoon as the sun began to set, soccer balls slammed into the rebounder, ricocheted off the wooden fence, and occasionally cleared both altogether sailing into our neighbor's yard. Between shots, they debated matchups, predicted winners, and erupted into cheers as if they were in the stands of Estadio Azteca instead of twenty feet from my kitchen window. Before I even open my mouth, something reacts inside me: a hint of tension, disappointment, a flash of irritation arriving ahead of any words. By the time I speak, my words come out edged and urgent. My voice rises a little, but it is the tone more than the volume that makes it feel like yelling.

I've started to wonder whether it's the tone itself that triggers them, or their interpretation of it. Because my template for this came from a house where yelling was simply the frequency we spoke in. It's what I know. But I don’t want my kids to grow up on that frequency, and frankly they're not equipped to receive it. They have a narrower emotional bandwidth than I do, simply because they've lived less life, which means I'm the one who has to widen mine to meet them, not the other way around.

That takes a clarity I don't always have in the moment. Before I can project a clear signal, I have to know what I'm actually trying to say, and half the time, in the heat of it, I don't. What comes out instead is pressure looking for an exit, not a message meant to land. My youngest and I have started using a single word for this: pause. It's become our shorthand for stepping back before either of us transmits something we don't mean. We're both still learning the frequency. Some days we find it. Some days we don't. I'm not trying to get this right every time. I just don't want yelling to be the only setting I know how to use.

So the shift for me has been toward speaking less. Chores, plans, goals... the boring logistics of a household now live on a piece of paper instead of riding in my tone. And in the harder moments, when the backyard gets loud, I'm trying to find my way to a look instead of a lecture, a glance that says what my voice keeps getting wrong. And if the signal still isn't coming through clearly, I will simply adjust again.

Perhaps the clearest evidence that communication isn't primarily verbal comes at the end of life.

For some of my friends reading this, the new era of communication isn't showing up through a perfectly timed text, or a summer spent trying to find the same frequency as their kids. It's showing up in something harder: watching a parent's words slowly start to go. My friend Marisa recently shared an episode of Spirit Speakers, where a woman named Stephanie Banks describes caring for her mother through dementia. As her mother's ability to speak diminished, Stephanie came to experience what she describes as "soul communication” or a sense of connection that no longer depended on spoken language. A channel that had nothing to do with the mind and everything to do with the parts of her mother that dementia couldn't touch. Through it came guidance, comfort, and a continued sense of connection.

I don't share that story to convince you of anything. I share it because I think anyone who has sat with a parent losing their words knows what Stephanie means.

Whether it's a friend, a child, or a parent, these stories point to the same practice: becoming quiet enough to notice what the noise of modern life so often drowns out. Christie wasn't doing anything special that Friday afternoon. No meditation retreat, no grand gesture. She was simply quiet enough to notice the gentle nudge… the hidden frequency that she chose not to ignore.

The next time someone crosses your mind for no obvious reason, don't overthink it. Send the text. Make the call. Worst case, you've reminded someone they're loved. Best case, you've answered a tap on the shoulder they were hoping someone would hear. With children, the same practice looks like adjusting your tone before you adjust your words, catching the frequency you're transmitting before it becomes the one they push back against. And when words themselves start to fail with an elder loved one who no longer has all the words, try listening past them. Watch the hands, the eyes, the breath. Sit in the silence instead of rushing to fill it. And whether you call it intuition, coincidence, or simple pattern recognition, the practice is the same: notice, become quiet, and act.

This is not about trying to become psychic, it’s about paying closer attention to the life you're already living and what may be right in front of you. Because attention shapes what we notice, what we notice shapes how we relate to the people around us, and noise has a way of dulling both. The world may be speaking to us more often than we realize. The question isn't whether the signal exists. It's whether we've mistaken constant noise for normal living, or whether, somewhere in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, we're willing to notice a tap on the shoulder.

Part 2 is the one I've been hesitant to write. It asks a question most of us never sit with: is intuition something you're born with, or a frequency anyone can learn to receive? I'll share what I've found, including the practices that have helped me trust mine again.