A Letter on the Season of Too Much
My Dearest Friend,
If I am being entirely honest, I do not have a profound lesson for you this week.
I am tired.
We are weeks away from a move, days away from packout, and somewhere between deciding what to donate, what to store, what to carry, and what paperwork still needs to be completed, I seem to have misplaced my capacity for reflection.
Last week, I found myself thinking about endings. I thought about showing up well for the people we love. I thought about gratitude and goodbyes and the shape of a chapter drawing to a close.
This week feels different.
The bookshelves have been dismantled and are mid-pack. The filing cabinet has been purged, but the papers still sit in small, unsorted piles waiting to be dealt with. The garage is not sorted so much as it is in progress, boxes pulled down, half-filled, open, everything in motion at once. The countdown is no longer theoretical, and the lists that once felt manageable now seem to multiply the moment I look away from them. Each day brings another appointment to schedule, another form to complete, another decision to make, and while none of them are particularly difficult on their own, together they fill every available corner of my mind.
It is a strange kind of fullness, where everything is still in motion and nothing is finished, and even the good things begin to feel heavy. This is the week of my husband’s formal squadron farewell—a long, significant event marking our departure from the unit—and, separately, one last evening with the women who have made this place feel like home. It is the kind of week that asks me to show up fully in more than one place, to say yes to moments that matter even as the work keeps pressing in. And yet it is also the week of packout prep, of final decisions, of tying together everything that cannot be left undone.
So I find myself standing in the middle of it, actively doing it all at once, trying to hold both. Trying to be present for the people I love while also carrying the quiet, constant work of getting us to the next place. Trying to decide what to donate, what to store, what to carry, what can wait, and what absolutely cannot.
There are more tasks than hours, more decisions than energy, more things I want to do than I have the capacity to hold well, and no real option but to keep moving anyway.
And perhaps that is what has changed between last week and this one. Not my gratitude. Not my desire to end this chapter well. Simply the reality that the work has arrived, and it is larger than the space I have to contain it.
The Lesson
Every PCS reaches a point where the math stops working, where there are simply more tasks than hours and more decisions than any one person can carry with care.
In those moments, the goal quietly shifts. It is no longer about doing everything well. It becomes about getting to the other side.
Endurance, I am learning, is not only the act of continuing when there is still work to be done, though there is that. It is also the quieter work of choosing what will not be done today, of deciding what can be set aside, delayed, or left for the version of ourselves who will have more capacity once this season has passed.
There is a kind of wisdom in that, a recognition that capacity is not a fixed trait but something that ebbs and returns. What cannot be carried now is not lost forever. It is simply waiting.
This season will end. The lists will shorten. The decisions will slow. And the version of me who arrives on the other side will have the space to pick up what I have had to set down along the way.
To the Spouse Who Has Reached the Edge of Their Capacity
If you find yourself in a week like this, where everything seems to be happening at once and even the good things feel like they are competing for the same limited energy, I hope you will be gentle with yourself.
You may not be able to do everything. You may not be able to do everything well. You may have to choose between what matters and what can wait, and those choices may not feel clean or comfortable.
Do what you can with what you have today. Let something be imperfect. Let something be postponed. Let something become a problem for the future version of you who will have more space to meet it.
And keep moving, not because it feels good or meaningful in every moment, but because this season, like all the others before it, will carry you forward whether you feel ready or not.
There will come a day, perhaps sooner than you expect, when the pace slows and the weight lifts and you realize that you have, somehow, made it through.
