Expanding capacity

The more often the captain of a ship is in the tempest and difficult sailing the greater his knowledge becomes. Therefore I am happy that you have had great tribulations and difficulties.... Strange it is that I love you and still I am happy that you have sorrows. - ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Image credit: Painting by Francesco Gamba (1818-1887, Italian), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Human potential is effectively infinite.

Yeah, there are certain areas in which we are approaching the limits of what individuals can do. There's only so fast that a man can run a mile, right? But we thought that nobody could run the mile in under four minutes until Roger Bannister did it in 1952. So what do we know.

Areas other than physical performance might be harder to measure. How do we know what we're capable of?

And what does "talent" mean? Is it a measure of our aptitude — what's possible for us — or does it refer to the degree to which we've developed that aptitude?

Most of us haven't even discovered our aptitude. We don't know our capacity because we haven't reached it. The more we grow and learn, the more we grow and learn.

And if we're a beginner at something, we can hardly blame our poor performance on a lack of talent. We haven't awakened it yet.

I don't think capacity works like a ceiling. I think it expands like a balloon. I believe the more we push against it, the more it grows. If we want to expand our capacity — to increase our aptitude and our very potential — we need to challenge ourselves. By asking ourselves to do more, we will be able to do more.

I'm in the rare situation of revisiting the exact job I had three years ago, pre-pandemic. I can see how I've changed, although I didn't think I was changing. The gradual changes that we all experience without realizing it are visible to me because I am able to compare myself to the self of three years ago, not the self of yesterday.

I'm approaching a lot of things differently. Things that used to be challenging to me no longer are; things that used to frustrate me no longer do. My capacity has grown as a result of pushing up against it. I've done hard stuff, and when that stuff wasn't hard anymore, I did stuff that was harder. My reward, of course, was even harder stuff — and the greater strength and resilience to overcome it.

I know that I'm not the only one who has spent the past couple of years in a state of growth (miserable and unwelcome as it may have been at times). I wonder how your tolerance for discomfort and uncertainty has grown. I imagine that you're more skilled at navigating new situations, better able to deal with disappointment, and can handle less than optimal working conditions more gracefully than you used to. The price was high, but your capacity has expanded.

I didn't know that I could teach in a mask. I didn't know that I could face, with equanimity, the prospect of the loss of the businesses I had built (I ultimately didn't lose them, but I was ready to). I didn't know that I could make, and live with, painful choices day after day.

The result is that we can do more than we thought we could, which hints at still more that we could do if we had to.

But I don't want to have to. I don't know about you, but I kind of want to do more growing by choice than out of necessity. I'd like to decide my own direction and build capacity in the areas that are important to me instead of leaving it only to chance or circumstance.

Therefore, in certain moments in which I might normally seek comfort, I'm nudging myself away from it. I'm stretching myself just slightly in the ways that matter. The result is that I continue to need a little less ease and can take a little more stress. And then what was once stressful simply isn't anymore.

I hope you have lots of joy and satisfaction in your life. I hope you can take pleasure in your accomplishments and experience bountiful moments of pleasure and comfort.

And if you want them, I hope you have juicy challenges and interesting problems to solve. You have what it takes — and if you don't yet, you soon will.