When knowing isn’t the problem

I've become increasingly convinced that insight is often not the thing we're missing.

We can know a relationship has ended before we can leave it. Know a career no longer fits before we can imagine another one. Know a boundary before we can tolerate what setting it might cost us.

Last week, I felt this in a much more ordinary way.

It was the beginning of the school year. I was working, single parenting, supporting aging parents, and catching up on everything at home that we'd happily neglected while the kids and I were away in California.

And every day, I watched the things that weren't absolutely required fall away.

I wanted to write. I wanted to share more of the work I've been building. I wanted to get my voice out into the world.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

And at the end of each day, when I finally found a few minutes in which I could have done it, I couldn't.

There was simply nothing left.

Not because I had changed my mind.
Not because it wasn't important.
Not because I needed more clarity.

I had reached the edge of my capacity.

It made me think about how easily we can mistake the distance between knowing and doing for something else.

A lack of discipline.
A lack of courage.
Procrastination.
Fear.
Uncertainty.

Sometimes those things are there.

But sometimes we know.

We just don't yet have the capacity to live what we know.

And that distinction feels important to me.

Because if the problem isn't clarity, asking ourselves to think harder won't solve it.

If the problem isn't courage, telling ourselves to be braver won't solve it.

And if the problem isn't motivation, another productivity system probably won't solve it either.

Sometimes the work isn't increasing our capacity to carry more.

Sometimes it's noticing what is consuming the capacity we already have.

And here I am, a week later, writing this.

Not on the schedule I had planned. Not because I finally pushed myself hard enough to get it done.

I simply listened to what I could hold in that moment and let that be enough.

The desire to write didn't disappear. The work didn't disappear. I didn't lose whatever momentum I imagined I was supposed to be maintaining.

A little more capacity became available, and here I am.

Maybe there's something in that, too.

Maybe honoring our capacity isn't always about giving up what matters. Sometimes it's what allows us to stay in relationship with it until we can return.

Which makes me wonder whether we've been asking the wrong question.

Instead of:

How do I know what to do?

Perhaps sometimes the question is:

What would I need to become capable of living what I already know?

Only the most important things…

This past weekend, I found myself standing in my house deciding what would fit into my car after the fires began here in Spokane.

We have one car, so whatever mattered most had to fit in it.

The kids, obviously. Our furry and scaly family members. Legal documents. A few changes of clothes. Family photo albums. My grandma’s watch.

It was such a strange thing to stand there deciding what came with us and what stayed behind.

We ended up being outside the path of the fires, and I know how incredibly fortunate we are. So many families weren’t. Some lost everything, and I can’t imagine what the coming months and years will look like as they rebuild.

I’m still a little shaken, if I’m honest. Not because of what happened to us directly, but because of how close it felt.

I don’t really have a point to this post. I just found myself looking around my house differently this week and looking at the people I share it with differently too.

Writing my eulogy

In 2020, when the world slowed during the pandemic, something inside me finally had space to catch up.

For years, I had been moving quickly, doing the things I believed I was supposed to do. I had built a career, a family, and a life that looked stable from the outside.

But when everything paused, I felt a deep exhaustion I could no longer ignore.

In that stillness, I looked around and realized something that broke my heart: the life I was living didn’t feel like my own.

So, I did something unusual.

I wrote my eulogy.

I asked myself a simple but confronting question:
If I died today, what would be said about how I lived?

What had I actually created with the time I had been given?

The answers brought tears and grief. They revealed the gap between the life I had built and the life that felt true inside of me.

After sitting with that grief, I wrote a second eulogy.

This time I wrote about the life I wished to live. The kind of presence I hoped to bring to my children, my relationships, and the world around me.

I realized that the distance between those two eulogies was the life I had not yet fully stepped into.

Since that day, I have been trying to live into that second eulogy.

Not perfectly. Not all at once.

But consciously.

Along the way, I began to notice something: life wasn’t changing in straight lines. It moved through cycles. Moments of unraveling, remembering, creating, and integrating.

Again and again, I found myself moving through what I now call the spiral.

The Spiral Way was born from that recognition.

It is a path of remembering our inner light and learning to consciously express the life that is asking to move through us.

And like the eulogy exercise itself, it begins with a simple question:
If you fully surrendered to the finality that is this one life, what would you want to create with the time you have left?