For the past week and a half, I’ve been in Georgia visiting friends and their two little ones—three and one, respectively, and cute enough to almost convince you that raising tiny humans is mostly giggles and matching pajamas.
Almost.
One afternoon, I was upstairs in their guest room cleaning the bathroom mirror when, for reasons I cannot explain, my brain decided this was the appropriate time for a philosophical breakthrough.
I started thinking about capacity.
And I actually laughed.
Years after serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer, apparently I am still out here thinking about capacity.
If you have ever worked anywhere near international development, you probably understand why this amused me. “Capacity building” is one of those phrases that follows you everywhere. We were always talking about strengthening capacity, assessing capacity, building capacity.
Years later, there I was in suburban Georgia, rag in hand, conducting an entirely different kind of capacity assessment.
On myself.
Being with my friends and watching them parent two very young children gave me a window into a life that, from the outside, is easy to reduce to a handful of big questions.
Do you want kids?
Do you want to get married?
Do you want a family?
Questions about what we want.
But somewhere between toddler negotiations, bottles, snacks, naps, laundry, toys, dinner, bedtime, and the general logistical operation required to keep two tiny people alive, another question started nagging at me:
Do I have the capacity for the life I say I want?
Not whether I could technically survive it.
Not whether I would love my children.
Not whether I could rise to the occasion if life required it of me.
Something much more ordinary than that.
What does this life require of me on a random Tuesday?
Emotionally.
Physically.
Financially.
Mentally.
Relationally.
And am I willing and able to carry that—not just desire the outcome?
We talk constantly about our hopes, dreams, and ambitions.
I want to be a mother.
I want to get married.
I want to own a business.
I want to be successful.
I want a beautiful house.
I want to travel the world.
I want to become a CEO.
I want to move abroad.
And none of those desires are shallow. There is nothing wrong with wanting any of them.
But I’m beginning to think we spend a lot more time imagining the nouns than considering the verbs.
Motherhood sounds one way.
Mothering is something else entirely.
Entrepreneurship sounds exciting.
Running a business means answering emails when you don’t feel like it, managing money, finding clients, solving problems, making decisions, tolerating uncertainty, and occasionally wondering why you ever thought working for yourself would mean working less.
Marriage is a beautiful idea.
Being someone’s partner requires communication, compromise, emotional regulation, patience, consideration, and showing up for another person even when you are tired, irritated, overwhelmed, or would personally prefer to be left alone.
A beautiful home sounds wonderful.
Maintaining a home requires cleaning it.
Which, considering I came to this realization while wiping someone else’s bathroom mirror, feels particularly relevant.
We fall in love with nouns. Capacity lives in the verbs.
That realization came into sharper focus while watching my friend’s wife with their children.
She was tired.
Of course she was tired.
They have a one-year-old and a three-year-old.
There are stretches of the day when practically every minute belongs to someone else. Someone needs to be fed. Someone needs help. Someone is crying. Someone has lost something. Someone needs to be changed. Someone has suddenly decided that the cup they happily drank from yesterday is now an unacceptable cup and an affront to human dignity.
And yet, watching her, I kept thinking: she has the capacity for this.
Not because she never gets overwhelmed.
Not because parenting comes effortlessly.
And certainly not because loving your children somehow makes exhaustion disappear.
But there was something about watching her move through the demands of the day that made me understand the difference between wanting something and being able to hold it.
She was mothering.
Actively.
Repeatedly.
In all the small, unglamorous ways that rarely make it into conversations about whether someone “wants kids.”
And I realized that I don’t hear us talk about that part nearly enough.
When people are dating, for example, “Do you want children?” is treated as a major compatibility question.
Which makes sense.
But maybe there are questions underneath that question.
What kind of life do you imagine when you picture having children?
How much of your autonomy are you comfortable surrendering?
How do you handle chronic interruption?
How do you behave when you are exhausted?
What kind of support system would you need?
What kind of partner would you need?
What would parenting require of you financially?
What would it require emotionally?
Do you enjoy caretaking?
How much quiet do you need to feel like yourself?
How much structure?
How much freedom?
What happens when the life you chose begins asking more from you than you imagined?
Those questions feel less romantic.
They are also probably more useful.
And motherhood is only one example.
Once I noticed the question of capacity, I started seeing it everywhere.
I think about career ambition.
There are positions I have wanted because I liked the title, the impact, the authority, the salary, or the idea of what reaching that level would mean about me.
But do I want the meetings?
The personnel issues?
The constant decision-making?
The responsibility when something goes wrong?
The political navigation?
The fact that being important at work often means work has significantly more opportunities to interrupt your life?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
But that is a different question than whether I want the promotion.
I think about entrepreneurship the same way.
I love creating things. I love having ideas. I love the freedom of imagining something and building it exactly the way I think it should exist.
But wanting a business is different from having the capacity to run one.
There is the work you dream about doing.
And then there is accounting.
There is always accounting.
Travel has its own version of this.
I love the idea of being someone who can pick up and go anywhere. I have built entire pieces of my identity around movement, curiosity, exploration, and the freedom to experience different places.
But even the life of a traveler requires capacity.
For uncertainty.
For disrupted routines.
For airports.
For logistics.
For being far from your people.
For constantly figuring things out.
For sometimes feeling untethered.
Every life comes with maintenance.
That may be the part I have been thinking about most since Georgia.
We tend to ask ourselves whether we want the beautiful part of a life.
Maybe we also need to ask whether we are willing to live its maintenance.
Because the maintenance is the life.
The family portrait might be beautiful, but family life is happening in the hundred ordinary moments before and after the picture.
The career milestone is exciting, but the career is mostly the work between milestones.
The passport stamps are fun, but travel is also standing in security lines, hauling luggage, changing plans, and figuring out why your phone suddenly refuses to connect to anything.
The dream is the highlight reel.
Capacity is what allows you to live through everything that happens in between.
I also don’t think capacity is something we either possess or don’t.
That feels too rigid.
Capacity changes.
Money changes it.
Community changes it.
Health changes it.
A supportive partner changes it.
Childcare changes it.
Age changes it.
Experience changes it.
The season of life you’re in changes it.
Sometimes the answer isn’t, “I don’t have the capacity for that.”
Sometimes it’s, “I don’t have the capacity for that under these conditions.”
And that distinction matters.
There are lives we might be completely capable of living with the right support and utterly depleted trying to live without it.
There are things we may want someday but not now.
There are things we may discover we only wanted because they represented something else: success, adulthood, security, belonging, proof that our lives had unfolded correctly.
And there may be things we are perfectly capable of doing that we simply decide we do not want to spend our capacity on.
I think that might be the part that feels most liberating.
Capacity is finite.
Time is finite.
Energy is finite.
Attention is finite.
Choosing one life inevitably means giving less of yourself to another possible life.
So maybe adulthood isn’t only about figuring out what you want.
Maybe it is also about becoming more honest about what you want to carry.
A week and a half in Georgia didn’t answer any of these questions for me.
If anything, it gave me more of them.
But perhaps that is one of the quieter gifts of travel.
Sometimes you go somewhere and see a monument.
Sometimes you eat something incredible.
Sometimes you stand somewhere beautiful and feel profoundly small.
And sometimes you stay in your friends’ house, watch the rhythm of their ordinary life, clean a bathroom mirror, and suddenly see your own life differently.
I am still figuring out what I want mine to look like.
But I think I have a better question now.
Not only:
Do I want this life?
But:
What would this life ask of me on an ordinary Tuesday?
And do I want to become someone with the capacity to hold it?