What Do I Have Available?

Last week, we followed a mother through a day as her capacity kept changing, with one thing added after another. If you missed that article, you can read it here. By the time she walked into her kitchen and saw that the dishwasher chore had not been completed, she had very little left.

As I continued to think about her story this week, I found myself less interested in the moment she yelled and more interested in what came before. She noticed it at the dishwasher, but that wasn’t where the story began. Truthfully, it was her son’s face that stopped her in her tracks. Seeing his reaction seemed to interrupt something in her. She recognized the impact of what had just happened, told him she needed some space, and went upstairs.

We could look at that moment and ask why she did not notice sooner. But I think that question can quickly become another way to judge ourselves for something we can see much more clearly in hindsight. Instead, I found myself wondering something else. Did she know what she had available to her?

When we walk backward through her day, we can see how much had already happened before she reached that kitchen. She had spent hours trying to get home through a storm. At times, there were fewer cars on the road, but the worsening snow required more concentration than she usually needed to drive safely. At other times, she sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic with everyone else trying to get home as the weather continued to worsen. The traffic demanded a different kind of patience and cognitive bandwidth. Her head hurt, and she put on soothing music to ease the headache while so much of her attention was on the drive. Before the drive, there had been long lines at the grocery store. Before the grocery store, there had been anticipation of what the weekend would bring and the realization that she needed to be prepared for the next week even before this week had ended, even though it had already been a demanding day at work. Through much of it, her thinking settled into a single refrain: I just need to get through this. Get through the store. Get through the traffic. Get through the drive. Get home.

But if we keep walking backward, we eventually arrive at the woman leaving work. She was already tired. She knew a storm was coming. She also knew she needed groceries, so she stopped on her way home. There is nothing particularly unusual about that decision. In fact, it probably looked like the responsible choice. She was already out, the groceries needed to be bought, and she could pick them up before going home. What I wonder is whether she knew what she had available when she made that decision.

I sometimes think of capacity as a teacup on a saucer, with a teapot continuously pouring into it. Sometimes the flow is strong, and the cup fills quickly; sometimes it is little more than a trickle. Each person’s flow is different, and even our own flow can change from one day to the next, or even from one moment to the next. What is in the cup is for us. It is what we need to think, regulate, make decisions, manage our emotions, care for our bodies, and move through our own lives. As the cup fills and reaches the rim, it begins to overflow onto the saucer. That overflow is what we have available for other people, responsibilities, tasks, and all the additional things life asks of us.

When there is something on the saucer, we have something available to give. But life does not stop asking just because the saucer is empty. When nothing is left on the saucer and life keeps asking, we begin drawing from inside the cup. That does not mean we are doing anything wrong. Sometimes life requires us to draw from the cup. Children get sick. Work has deadlines. Emergencies happen. Sometimes something simply needs to be done, and there is no easy alternative. The important difference may be knowing when we are doing so.

If we look at the mother leaving work through the teacup and saucer, I do not think we need to decide exactly how full or empty her cup was. We only need to wonder whether she knew. Had the demands of the workday already used up what was on her saucer? Had she started drawing from inside the cup before she even reached the grocery store? More importantly, was any of that information available to her when responsibility said, I need to get groceries?

Knowing what she had available would not necessarily have told her not to go. Maybe she would still have done the entire grocery shop. Maybe she would have decided she only really needed two things that night. Maybe she would have grabbed something to eat and drink before heading home. Maybe she would have called her husband to ask if he could take care of the groceries. There were likely many possibilities, and there is no way for us to know which would have been the best choice for that particular night. That is not really the point. The grocery store was not the mistake. The real question is whether her capacity had any voice in the decision.

Many of us have had plenty of practice asking, “What do I need to do?” We ask it when we wake up in the morning, when we check our calendars, when someone needs something from us, when we leave work, and when we walk through the door at home. What needs to happen next? What have I forgotten? Who needs me? What still needs to be finished? We can become incredibly good at recognizing responsibility, but what about the practice of asking, “What do I have available?” That is a very different question. One asks us to look at what the moment requires of us. The other asks us to notice the person who will have to meet that requirement.

We need both. Responsibility matters. There will always be things that need to be done. But capacity matters too. Self-awareness gives us access to information about what we have available, and that can shape how we decide what to ask of ourselves. It does not remove responsibility or tell us what choice to make. It simply means responsibility is no longer the only information informing our choice.

This has made me think differently about the phrase “notice sooner.” When I say “notice sooner and return faster,” “sooner” can sound like the moment just before something goes wrong. Notice your irritation before you yell. Notice your voice changing. Notice your shoulders tightening. Catch yourself before you say the thing you wish you could take back. Those things matter, but I think “sooner” may start much earlier than that.

By the time this mother stood in front of the dishwasher, very little was left. Her son’s face was finally powerful enough to stop her in her tracks. But what if noticing sooner is also about becoming familiar enough with our own changing capacity to recognize what we have available before we keep asking more of ourselves?

Sometimes in life, we cannot know what is coming. She could not know exactly what the storm would bring to the roads, how long the lines at the grocery store would be, how slowly traffic would move, how demanding the drive home would be, or what would be waiting when she finally walked through the door. None of us can arrange our lives so we always have enough capacity for whatever happens next. But we can begin to learn the condition of our own cup. We can become curious about what it feels like when there is plenty on the saucer, when the saucer has emptied, and when life begins drawing from what is inside the cup. Perhaps that is part of what it means to notice sooner. Not becoming better at predicting everything life might ask of us, but becoming more familiar with what we have available as our capacity changes.

Notice sooner isn’t about predicting the storm. It is about knowing the condition of your cup before the storm arrives.