We Weren't Busy, We Just Hadn't Met Busy Yet
A few months ago, I had my second son. My husband likes to say he's our last. It's been overwhelming, exhausting, and genuinely beautiful, all tangled together. It also happened to land right as Phoenix let go of summer and the valley started coming back to life.
I've had a lot of 3 a.m. hours lately. Rocking a baby back to sleep, toddler down the hall, house completely still except for me. There's something kind of wonderful about that hour, when the whole world agrees to be quiet, just for me.
Before this son, before my first one even, my husband and I used to joke about how busy our lives were. Looking back, we were adorable. We really thought we knew what tired meant. We had one dog. We slept through the night. We called a Tuesday with two errands "busy," and we meant it. We weren't busy. We just hadn't been properly introduced to busy yet. We had, what I could call, plenty of “capacity.”
Somewhere in the last few months, we built a different kind of life around less capacity, mostly by accident. Meals take fifteen minutes now instead of fifty, and some of my fifteen-minute meals are better than my fifty-minute ones ever were. He works out at night, after the kids are down. I go in the morning, before anyone needs me yet, which buys me a solid eleven minutes of feeling like a very capable woman. The weekends absorb whatever the week didn't finish, and somehow, it still gets finished.
Here's what I keep coming back to: capacity isn't really about effort. It's about time. And time is one of those things you don't think much about, right up until you're down to very little of it.
If you run your own business, you already know this one. Different inputs, same feeling. Client emails instead of 2 a.m. feedings, both of which show up at exactly the moment you sat down. Owning your time is supposed to be the whole perk of working for yourself. What they don't tell you is that you also get to decide, every single day, what's actually worth your time, which is its own kind of gift, even on the days it doesn't feel like one.
That's the thing I believe most, both at home and in the work I do at Wulff Insights: capacity isn't something you find by doing more. It's something you build, on purpose, so there's room left over. For the business, for the people you love, for a Tuesday afternoon that doesn't need to be productive to count.
Capacity was never about doing more. It was about building something sturdy enough to hold its own weight, so you're free to carry something else for a while. Like a new business idea. Or a newborn who still fits in the crook of one arm. However you find that capacity, here's to spending it well.
