I’ve been thinking lately about attention. Specifically, what happens when there are more things you love than you can possibly give yourself to.

For years, I've felt stretched between competing demands, responsibilities, and passions- more than I can reasonably hold at once.

There is artwork to be made, practical work that needs doing, children who need meals and guidance and attention and love. There is a manuscript waiting for a final pass of edits, bills to keep track of, housework that’s never fully resolved, and the ongoing challenge of caring for a body that has limits.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I'm trying to determine what deserves my attention today and what must wait until tomorrow. Or perhaps realizing, again and again, that every yes is also a hundred tiny no's.

When I first sat down to write this, I thought I was going to write about work and rest: the push and pull between effort and recovery, the sprint to the end of the school year, the long hours at the bench creating a body of silver work for Her Terrain, and the exhaustion that followed.

All of that is true.

But the more I sit with these thoughts, the more I feel that the real challenge isn't work versus rest. It's how to live a meaningful life when so many worthy pursuits are asking for my attention.

If the problem were simply overwork, the solution would be obvious: do less.

But what can be done when the things competing for my attention aren't distractions? What do you do when they are your children, your creative work, your health, your home, your responsibilities, your relationships, and your desire to build something more rooted and whole than what you've known before?

There’s a quiet grief in this realization. Not because life is without abundance, but because attention is finite.

There is art I want to see and art I want to make. Skills I want to learn. Places I want to explore. Conversations I want to have. Projects I want to bring into the world. There are people I love who deserve more of me than I sometimes have to give.

And beneath all of it is the simple reality that I cannot give myself fully to everything I love.

The world encourages us to believe that enough discipline will somehow create more hours. It won't. No amount of optimization can remove the necessity of choosing.

Perhaps some of the exhaustion comes not only from doing too much, but from continually negotiating that truth. From accepting, day after day, that a meaningful life is not built by saying yes to everything, but by choosing what receives my attention and trusting that the rest is not lost.

I'm learning that devotion and frenzy are not the same thing; that a full life and a frantic life can look remarkably similar from the outside. I suspect I've mistaken one for the other more than once.

For now, I'm trying to pay attention to what matters, to what is asking to be built, and to what can wait. Today life feels full, beautiful, exhausting, and wild. And that feels like an honest place to begin.

— Katie