When Knowing Isn’t Enough: What Shapes Our Capacity?

On Wednesday, the reflection question was: How can we know what to do and still not do it?

I have been sitting with that question since then. On the surface, knowing and doing seem to follow one another naturally. We learn. We understand. We practise. Eventually, we know better. And if we know better, it would seem we should do better.

Last week, in Why Didn’t I Do Better?, we explored what it can look like when that seemingly simple progression falls apart. But as always, when we sit with something and reflect a little more deeply, the surface thoughts we might jump to in an attempt to tidy things up and close the loop with a bow may not be the most accurate. Sometimes, asking more questions and staying curious a little longer helps us see what we could not before. Human beings do not always follow that neat progression. We learn, practise, and change. We may have responded differently dozens of times, and then one Tuesday morning, there it is again.

Why?

Why can we genuinely know how we want to do things, have practised doing them differently, and still find ourselves responding in ways we thought we had moved beyond? I think part of the answer lies in the word capacity.

Perhaps part of what makes these moments so difficult is that we tend to think of change as something we eventually finish. We learn something, practise it enough, change how we respond, and then expect that particular struggle to stay behind us. We fixed it. We should not have to worry about it anymore. So when it shows up again, we can quickly move from wondering what happened in that moment to wondering what it says about us. Our internal thought processes go wild with “I thought I had dealt with this.” “I should know better by now.” “Maybe I haven’t changed as much as I thought I had.” Without realizing it, we can take a moment when our capacity was limited and turn it into a statement about our identity. We stop seeing it as a moment in time, experienced by a human being under specific conditions, and start using it as evidence of who we are. Capacity offers another way to view that moment.

Think for a moment about the electricity coming into your home. Most of the time, we probably do not think about it at all. We turn on a light, plug in the kettle, run the dishwasher, charge our phones, and expect the power to be there when we need it. Everything works because there is enough electricity to meet our demands on the system.

But there is something called a brownout. Unlike a blackout, where the power goes out completely, during a brownout electricity still flows into the house, though less power is available. The lights might dim or flicker. Some things may continue to work, while others may not work as well. You might still be able to turn on a lamp, but that does not necessarily mean there is enough power to run everything in the house at the same time, and some electrical devices may go offline. And here is the part of the analogy that I think matters when we talk about capacity: nothing disappeared. The lamp is still a lamp. The refrigerator is still a refrigerator. The kettle has not forgotten how to boil water. All the wiring that carried electricity yesterday is still there. What changed was what the system had available to work with.

I think something similar can happen to us. Our knowledge does not suddenly disappear. Neither do our values; the skills we have learned and practised do not disappear, nor do our intentions necessarily change. But what we can access and use in a particular moment can.

So, what influences what is available?

When we first started exploring capacity a couple of weeks ago, I shared an image of a toolbox surrounded by five words: physical, emotional, environmental, relational, and cognitive. We did not spend much time exploring those five areas then, but it was a precursor to what we could think about. First, I think we needed to open a conversation to begin to understand what capacity is. Then last week, rather than explaining limited capacity, we stepped into one mother’s morning and explored how that experience could change with different cognition, environment, relational connections, and physical space. So now is a perfect time to go back to that toolbox and explore a bit more deeply.

Those five areas give us a way to slow down an experience and notice what may be influencing what is available to us. But they do not exist in separate little boxes. We are whole human beings. What happens physically can affect us emotionally. What is happening in our relationships can influence what we are thinking about. What is happening around us can change what demands our attention. Something that begins in one area can ripple through all the others.

Last week, without naming them, we watched all five interact during Mom’s morning. Physically, Mom was tired. Emotionally, she was worried about her mother and under pressure about the presentation she had spent the past month preparing for. Environmentally, there was breakfast to make, a child to dress, daycare, work, traffic, last-minute changes to her presentation, and a clock that was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Relationally, her husband was working nights, her mother was sick, her child needed her, and people at work were expecting something from her. Cognitively, she was trying to remember, plan, organize, prioritize, calculate time, anticipate what might happen if she was late, and respond to the child sitting on the bedroom floor.

Even dividing the morning into those five areas does not quite capture what was happening, because each one affected the others. Her husband’s night shift was relational, but it also changed the demands of the environment because she was carrying the morning routine without him. Worry about her mother was relational and emotional, and it took part of her bandwidth away from the morning. Being tired was physical, but it can also make it harder to think clearly, regulate emotions, or tolerate another demand. The presentation existed outside of her, but her thoughts about what could happen if she was late travelled with her into the bathroom and down the hall toward her child.

And then there was the alarm.

Mom knew they needed to leave on time in both versions of this story. The clock was not new. What changed last week was that an alarm sounded every seven minutes, bringing her attention back to the time and the meaning she had made of it that day. Twenty-one minutes. Then fourteen. The alarm itself was not a bad thing. In fact, in a way, to keep on track, it might have been a great idea without Dad there. Mom had probably set it because it was useful. It helped her keep track of a busy morning. But the sound of the alarm did not mean only seven minutes had passed. Mom had attached meaning and expectations to those passing minutes. Seven fewer minutes meant less time for breakfast. Less time to get out the door. Less time to get to work. Less time to make the changes to her presentation. Her thoughts had already travelled ahead to what might happen if she arrived late and unprepared.

Every time the alarm sounded, time moved back into the foreground. And one more thing required her attention. The amount of actual time may not have changed much. Her experience of time did.

I think this is part of what makes capacity so deeply human. We do not experience the same circumstances in exactly the same way every time. Something that barely registers one day may require much more from us another. What one person can carry easily may require considerable capacity from someone else. What is happening physically, emotionally, environmentally, relationally, and cognitively changes the conditions under which we meet the moment in front of us. That does not make capacity a measure of who we are. Capacity is a reflection of what is available to us within a particular moment and set of conditions.

Go back for a moment to the soft thud Mom hears from the bedroom.

In the original Connection Before Correction story, Mom hears it while she is getting ready. She does not immediately run down the hall. Her child is not bleeding, in danger, or asking for her at that moment, so she finishes what she is doing before she goes to see what happened. Something important lies in that small decision.

Mom is effectively putting on her own oxygen mask first. She gives herself the moment she needs to finish getting ready before entering a situation where her child may need to borrow some of her capacity. That little bit of space also allows her to notice herself and decide how she wants to approach her child. When she walks down the hall, she arrives with enough capacity to observe, become curious, and eventually see more than a child refusing to put on pants.

Last week, the thud occurred almost at the same time as the alarm. This time, the thud registered as one more thing she needed to deal with. The alarm, the clock, and everything those passing minutes had come to mean created a sense of urgency. Mom no longer felt she had a moment to finish what she was doing and decide how she wanted to enter the interaction. It felt as though the situation needed her attention now. So, she went to her child while her mind was already somewhere else.

That difference mattered.

By the time her child looked up and said, “Too scratchy, I no want these pants,” Mom heard the words. The information was there, and she already knew how to understand it. She knew her child had slept poorly. She knew Dad was missing from their usual morning routine. She knew behaviour could signal something happening beneath the surface. She knew that a tired child might experience the seam in a pair of pants differently than they had the week before. But knowing all of those things and being able to hold them all at the same time are not necessarily the same.

In the first version of the morning, Mom could see the pants, her child’s discomfort, the poor night’s sleep, the change in routine, the missing connection with Dad, her own need to get to work, and the larger goal of helping her child get dressed. She had enough to hold a much wider picture. In last week’s version, however, the picture narrowed. She saw the pants. She saw the refusal. She heard the clock and connected it to how late she thought they were going to be. The rest had not disappeared. It had become harder to see.

This is another way I have been thinking about capacity. Some days, our visibility is clear enough that we can see quite a distance ahead of us. We can take in what is happening right now while still holding context, perspective, and a sense of where we are trying to go. Other times, our visibility narrows, like driving on a foggy, rainy day. What is directly in front of us becomes so dominant that it is much harder to see everything around it.

For Mom, the clock moved into the foreground while much of what she knew about the day’s circumstances and her child receded. Yet even then, her capacity was not gone. There is a small moment in last week’s story that is easy to overlook. Mom grows increasingly frustrated with the pants. She insists they are not scratchy. She reminds her child that they wore them the week before. She tries to help put them on. Her child kicks their legs away and yells no. Eventually, in frustration, Mom asks, “What pants do you want?” She does not suddenly become the mother we met in the first story. She does not sit down and explore what is happening. She does not recognize the missing connection with Dad. She does not repair the disconnection between them in that moment. But she changes course. She gets another pair of pants, and that is enough to defuse the moment. That matters because capacity is not simply something we either have or do not have. It can change throughout a day and even within a single interaction. We may not have enough to respond exactly as we hoped yet still have enough for one small shift in direction.

Then, later, when Mom reaches the red light. For the first time all morning, there is nothing she can do to make the morning move faster. Her child is at daycare. The pants are no longer waiting on the bedroom floor. Breakfast no longer needs to be made. She is still worried about work; her presentation has not disappeared, and the morning has already happened, but some of the immediate demands on her system have changed, and suddenly she can see more. She remembers the poor night’s sleep. She remembers that Dad was not there. She remembers her child saying the pants hurt. She remembers what she knows about behaviour. She remembers her own words. Nothing new was learned at that red light. The knowledge was there all along. What changed was what she could access.

So, how can we know what to do and still not do it?

I think part of the answer is that knowing is only one part of what we bring to any moment. We bring our bodies, emotions, environments, relationships, thoughts, histories, expectations, and everything else that is already asking something of us. All of those things interact with the capacity available to us and shape what we can see, hold, and reach in a particular moment. Some days we will have more capacity. Some days we will have less. Sometimes the difference between those days may be obvious. Other times, it may be as ordinary as one more alarm going off in the bathroom on a Tuesday morning. None of those moments alone define who we are. They are moments in time.

As we explore our understanding of ourselves and the conditions that shape our responses, the goal may not be to reach a point where our capacity never changes again. Perhaps part of growth is becoming better at noticing sooner and returning faster, so that understanding what happened and working with what is available is easier, before we find ourselves sitting at the red light, wondering what happened.