The Name My House Bestowed [1,090]
I think it’s a shared human experience to want to operate better. To reach flow state; call it optimization, call it enlightenment. The specific definition left up to the individual for interpretation but no matter, I think it’s a shared human experience to want to operate better.
While the desire may be universal, the starting conditions rarely are - and we’re rarely aware of them until well into the race.
This has been looked at through the lens of communication and attachment styles, and the ability to maintain personal relationships. These are all big important moments and behaviors to look at. But if we just zoom in a bit, I think we’ll find equally consequential effects at play in smaller spaces.
As we develop these foundations in our internal selves, we develop a relationship with the maintenance surrounding life. I’m talking about patterns that are so normal and internalized that we almost lose the ability to recognize them as patterns at all.
I’m talking about the space between the habits of people who put their garbage bins out the night before, and the habits of people who rush out in their slippers on the morning of.
How much margin lies between the house that acclimates and the house that anticipates?
The question isn’t really about garbage bins or concrete margins. I want to talk about the capacity you start out with depending on whether your formative home taught you to prepare for life or recover from it.
One household expects life to happen as it does. The other expects life to be an emergency.
The framework behind these reality’s are rarely addressed or spoken of, especially while they’re first being formed. You don’t recognize conversations overheard from your parents about domestic labor and daily operations of the house as fundamental, in fact, your conscious brain may not recognize them at all.
So you never question why your home doesn’t have a calendar because your home has never had a calendar.
You might call yourself “bad with money”, when in the back of your brain there remains an image of your mother hunched over a checkbook, tension clear through her demeanor.
So we end up calling ourselves by the name of our environment, by the name of a container we have resentment for but still hold ourselves in.
Again - we end up calling ourselves by the name of our environment, by the name of a container we have resentment for but still hold ourselves in.
Because eventually, this container changes from something that we were placed in to something we lock ourselves into.
That’s a f*cked place to be in.
Because at what point does the environment we inherit become our identity?
Some people inherit assets.
Some people inherit debts.
All inherit capacity.
Capacity for what?
The capacity to manage? Money, schedules, appointments, and all of the things that repeat.
The capacity to regulate? Emotions. Confrontation.
The capacity to recover? To know what we need in the moments that we need them, to go a step further and be able to anticipate these moments before they arrive?
The most impactful inheritance of your life has already been given to you. The capacity to handle the sh*t life will inevitably throw at you, and the capacity to prevent the speed at which that happens.
This is the part where naturally it might feel like we would lean into talking about discipline, about grit, about getting the job done when you don’t want to.
But I think doing so would skip over something far more interesting.
Before a person can ever display discipline, they first develop assumptions. Assumptions about what deserves attention; about what things are prioritized during in between moments, about whether the future is something to prepare for with optimism or fear.
We often view discipline as something outside of this. On the contrary, it’s the foundation of it. We look at the capacity of people as something inherited biologically, like some people have it and some people don’t out of divine blessing or lack thereof.
A clean home does not feel disciplined to someone who grew up doing chores. It feels normal.
Meal planning does not feel disciplined to the person who had home-cooked meals regularly in their formative home. It feels normal. To take it smaller- cooking a dinner does not feel like an accomplishment to this person, and to another it’s a grand display.
What one person experiences as rhythm in the day, another experiences extreme effort.
Interesting to me, and often not a comfortable conversation, is that I find the people with the least perceived capacity to be those with the most.
The people who, at face value, are unorganized procrastinators are often very good at juggling multitasking, or reading rooms energetically. They know how to pull things together with too little time, not enough resources, not enough money. While people who are initially viewed as straight-edged and having it all together can come home and collapse under the weight of a world dependent on predictability. A delayed flight, an unexpected expense, a disruption to routine, and suddenly the machinery grinds against itself.
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t think the answer lies at either end of the spectrum. I don’t think the goal is to become less adaptable, nor do I think it’s to become less intentional.
I think the reality most of us are searching for exists somewhere in the middle. A life with enough structure to create margin, and enough flexibility to survive when margin disappears.
Because neither person is without capacity. They have simply become fluent in different environments.
And fluency is learned.
No matter your age, you are not too old to learn the language of a different environment, to become fluent in something else. To become conversational in adaptation when you’re only fluent in damage control, to practice maintenance when you’ve built a life around improvisation. To introduce rhythm in a place where only reaction exists.
It’s a human experience, not a unique experience, to have what you yearn for be miles away from where you start.
Perhaps adulthood is not the process of building capacity.
Perhaps adulthood is the process of auditing it.
Looking at the capacities we inherited and asking WHETHER AND WHERE they are still serving the environment we’re currently trying to live in.
Not changing core pieces of ourselves.
Not romanticizing them, either.
But thanking them for the work they did and deciding—with intention—which capacities deserve a permanent place in the home we’re trying to build next.