Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about where my energy goes.
The other day during piano practice, my daughter became very frustrated—throwing her body around, crying, screaming. It escalated quickly, and I felt my own emotions immediately rise with hers. My instinct was to correct, control, and stop the behavior as quickly as possible.
Later, after things settled, I realized she did need guidance and support, but I didn’t love the way I showed up in that moment.
Parenting has a way of revealing you to yourself in real time. It shows you where you are patient, where you are depleted, where you are reacting from stress instead of intention. And I think what has stayed with me most lately is realizing how often all of us are simply responding from the emotional capacity we have that day.
Some days we are grounded and calm. Other days we react more quickly than we want to. Sometimes we handle things with grace, and other times we reflect afterward wishing we had softened instead of escalated.
Instead of judging myself for those moments, I’ve been trying to understand them more deeply.
I’ve been asking myself what actually deserves my energy.
Because so much of life quietly pulls from us—urgency, resentment, overthinking, pressure, conflict, comparison, the need to control outcomes, the need to be right. And when we are constantly reacting to everything around us, we lose connection with the things that matter most.
Today, I was at the hospital for a routine check-up, and sitting in the waiting room brought back memories I hadn’t visited in a long time. The smell of the hospital instantly took me back to the years when I spent Fridays sitting through chemo infusions while life outside kept moving. I remember missing weekends, beautiful weather, dinners with friends, ordinary moments that everyone else seemed to move through so effortlessly. I remember feeling sick, losing my hair, recovering from surgeries, and wanting so badly just to feel healthy enough to fully live my life again.
Back then, I would have given anything for the ordinary life I have now.
And somewhere along the way, as life became busy and full again, I think I forgot how deeply I once understood the value of simply being here.
That reminder stayed with me today.
Life is incredibly fragile, and our energy is precious. The way we spend our days, the way we speak to the people we love, the things we choose to carry, and the things we choose to release—they all shape the quality of our lives more than we realize.
I don’t want to spend so much of my life emotionally consumed by things that ultimately do not matter.
I want to redirect that energy toward presence. Toward connection. Toward health. Toward peace. Toward the people I love. Toward the version of myself I am still becoming.
Maybe that begins with something very small:
Pausing before reacting.
Softening instead of tightening.
Letting go of what drains us unnecessarily.
Remembering what we once prayed for.
And meeting life, as imperfectly as we can, with a little more intention than the day before.
