The Museum of “Almosts” — And What It’s Going to Take to Change What’s In Yours

I was watching one of Eddie Pinero’s videos recently — if you don’t know him, he’s a YouTube storyteller whose work is the kind of thing you start at 10pm and look up from at midnight — and he described something he calls the “Almost Museum” that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.

Imagine you’re at the end of your life. You walk through a door, and on the other side is a museum. Then, you walk up to the first exhibit; it is something you always meant to do, and underneath it, a single word: Almost.

You keep walking to one exhibit from your life to another. Almost, almost, almost… on them.

I listened to this video twice.

Not because it was comfortable. Because it wasn’t. But it was true.

What “Almost” Actually Costs

The museum isn’t a punishment. Nobody put those things there to hurt you. You put them there yourself, one small decision at a time — or more accurately, one small non-decision at a time.

Not yet. When things settle down. Once I have more time, more money, more confidence, more of whatever I’ve decided I’m currently lacking.

The cost of an almost isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t happen in one moment of giving up. It happens slowly, in the accumulated weight of waiting for conditions that were never going to arrive on their own.

That’s the part that stayed with me.

I have someone close to me who realized he was done paying the cost for his almost. He had been wanting his real estate license for over twenty years.

It was the thing he kept coming back to and kept finding a reason not to do. But things got in the way. The timing was never right. He had a job, responsibilities, a life that kept moving forward while that one thing stayed exactly where it was, and for a while, he was okay with that.

Until this year, when something shifted. He went through a very hard personal season, and made a decision that enough was enough. At that moment, he declared to himself that this was going to be his year. He was going to start doing what it takes to get his real estate license. Not someday. Now.

He started going into work an hour early every morning to study.

Two weeks later, he passed his test!

Twenty years that sat in his museum as an, almost. Two weeks of actually doing it, and it was turning into a done.

When he told me, I just kept thinking about how proud I was of him for taking action. The only thing that changed was his mindset and the decision that today was the day, and then the very ordinary act of showing up an hour early and doing the work.

Honestly, that’s the whole gap. Between almost and done. It’s almost never about ability. It’s almost always about decision.

So, Why Don’t We?

I’ve thought about this a lot and I honestly don’t have a clean answer.

Is it fear of judgment? Fear of failure? Fear that if we try and it doesn’t work, we’ll have lost the comfort of the someday we’ve been holding onto?

Maybe. Probably. All of the above, depending on the day.

What I do know is this: it doesn’t really matter which fear it is. Because regardless of why we leave things unfinished, we all deserve to turn our almosts into dones. And most of the time, that doesn’t require a breakthrough or a perfect plan or the right conditions finally falling into place.

It just requires the next right step.

Not all the steps. Just the next one.

What Aligned Action Actually Looks Like

I talked about wanting to start making videos for six months before I actually started. Six months of knowing it was the right thing to do, knowing I had something worth saying, and finding a hundred small reasons why today wasn’t quite the day.

I’m telling you this because I think it’s important to be honest that this isn’t something I’ve figured out and you haven’t. The museum concept landed for me personally. I have my own almosts. We all do.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the difference between action and aligned action is that the aligned thing is almost always the one you already know.

You know.

You don’t need more information about it. And you don’t need to research it further or wait until you feel ready. You’ve probably been thinking about it for longer than you’d like to admit. It’s the thing that keeps coming back no matter how many times you put it down.

So, if you have something like that, start there.

If You Don’t Yet Have an Almost to Work Towards

Here’s something worth sitting with.

Every almost has a before.

Before the almost, before the years of not yet and someday, there was always a whisper. An inner knowing that said this — this is the direction, this is the thing, this is what you’re being called toward. And somewhere along the way, that whisper got quieter. Maybe at the same time as life got louder. And ultimately, the whisper got filed away under “someday”.

My friend’s whisper showed up for twenty years. Every time he heard it, he found a reason to put it back down. Until one day he didn’t.

And the wake-up call isn’t the hard part. For me, Eddie Pinero’s museum metaphor was the wake-up call. Maybe for you this blog will be the wake-up call. But wake-up calls only work if there’s somewhere to point after them.

But the first step isn’t action. It’s listening.

Because you can’t move toward something you haven’t let yourself fully hear yet. And once you can hear it the next right step tends to become a lot clearer than you’d expect! 

What if it Would Be Different?

Walk back through that museum door one more time.

Ask yourself: What if some of the exhibits looked different? What if underneath a few of them, instead of Almost — it just said Done?

You still have time to change what’s in there.

Pick the one thing. Just one. And do something about it today that isn’t nothing.

If you can hear a whisper but aren’t quite sure what it’s telling you — or you’ve been hearing it for a while and still don’t fully trust it — that’s exactly what Whispers Within Us is for.

Love, Light, and Gratitude 🩵

— Kathleen