🛰 Capacities
Broadening Potentials
One of my biggest fears is not living up to my potential. It’s a subtle dread that has loomed over me for as long as I can remember & in some ways I have already failed an earlier potential of mine because I am not writing this as a professional football player. I find this interesting because I currently have no interest in becoming a professional football player, however the younger version of me had no other vision in mind, no other options, so in a sense a limited capacity of what’s possible.
This vision of ourselves is intricately linked with our capacity or lack of capacity. Over the last few years I have seen the scope of my capacity shift wider and wider from wanting to create for myself to wanting to create conditions for a broader array of flourishing. A big part of this perspective shift in potential capacity has come from being exposed to a wider array of successful people from different backgrounds and some successfully mixing disciplines to be unique polymaths and so on. In a way if we don't see it we can’t be it.
So in returning to the question of potential capacity, I sometimes ask myself what is possible, that I am not yet seeing? What is our collective capacity? Or what is a healthy culture? These questions have been more fruitful to explore recently. Because it unlocks a capacity that is far greater than one person, while ultimately feeding back into the individual.
At a small dinner gathering last night in Angel we were discussing our journeys of how we got to where we are and where we envision going & in that moment an image came to mind of what people think when they think of an enhanced human capacity and it usually involves a person by themselves excelling at a sport or being really smart and rich or some combination of those. But in a way that’s like viewing a tree ripped from its roots and forest context & idolising it’s singular achievement without acknowledging the ecosystem of nourishment that made the tree flourish.
I share this image because I believe we haven’t even scratched the surface of our capacity because we haven’t truly nurtured the broader conditions (aka the ecosystem) that makes flourishing possible and when we start doing that collectively on a small medium and large scale the potential that will be unlocked will be unreal. The more I think about it I feel our true capacities have become dormant and atrophied. When we think of an enhanced capacity a picture of someone in the future taking some kind of nootropic pill may come to mind, but in reality what fascinates me is both past & parallel capacities in indigenous cultures like Polynesian way finding, collective insights and much more expansive qualities. This capacity is qualitatively different not just an increase in the number of floors a building holds or how fast someone can run, but an unimaginable shift in what is even possible.
So the next time you marvel at a satellite or some technical capacity that humanity has unlocked I invite you to contemplate on the wider context that made it possible & how that context of collective intelligence could be developed further.
🍃 Some Invitations 🍃
🕯In Light of. . .(Book a space for the next gathering)