Capabilities vs Limitations

What Awareness Am I Feeding?

I woke up with this thought running through my mind:

We often seem more aware of our limitations than our capabilities.

Besides being a bit sad, why would this be the case?  I think there may an answer, but it may take a while to develop it.  

First of all, there is the whole notion of awareness.  How do we become aware of something?  When and why do we become aware of things?  It seems observable that some of the answer lies in our development.  Kids, for example, may not be aware of certain things that adults are because they haven't experienced them yet.  On the other hand, watching a child closely reveals that they are hyper-aware of so many things; they are just very focused on what those things are.  They are deeply absorbing what is around them — figuratively and literally.

As adults, we've learned different approaches to what we are aware of or to what we maintain awareness about.  In fact, we are actively receiving and dismissing information all the time; using it as needed or not.

But another dynamic emerges in our development cycles as well, a type of calibration of what we can and cannot do well.  This is another kind of awareness that engages not only what we're aware of, but also what the consequences are of that awareness.  In other words, there is a social dynamic that becomes involved as we negotiate what we need to be aware of.  Now there is a value that is being attached to what we aware of and we use that as a factor in our equation of determining who we are and what we need to be.

And (here is the sad part), perhaps it is somewhere along the middle-part of this part of the process that we form conclusions about ourselves based on this value-system.  This shifts the dynamic again as we fiddle more with our own sense of agency than with the content involved.

Our awareness is still important and actually quite capable of continued development, but we have started another process related to how to orient ourselves to what we feel capable of.  While this step can still have some healthy components to it, we often end up using it to manage something.  We unconsciously feel a need to manage for something — to get something we want, to avoid things that could be painful to us, etc.

At this point, we are developing skill at using data to support our efforts to manage our existence in the world and this skill seems to lead us towards a kind of fork in the road.  Data is used to enhance a widening view of our relationship with the scope of life or it is used to narrow it.  And it is the latter that seems to foster our habits of focusing on what we can't do, rather than what we can.

To be clear, we are not infinite and those that leave the impression that we are mislead us.  On the other, we are capable of so much more than we think we are — and that is precisely why, because of how we come to think about it.

Acknowledging our limitations can be a healthy thing to our sense of equilibrium in the balance of life.  But, obsessing over them can significantly alter the capacity we all have to grow...and to continue growing.  

Focusing on limitations (versus capabilities) may also feel easier to us.  The may feel more specific, more defined, have less variation, and more easily reinforceable.  

Capability, on the other, can feel harder, more open, more unknown, more scary.  But, when our focus shifts entirely to what can't do, we rarely have much left to acknowledge what we can do.  Some of the most amazing people we know are those who have not focused exclusively on their limitations, but who have found a way to transfer their energy to things that they are capable of.  Besides the surprising revelation this still tends to be the nearly everyone, a different disposition towards life itself gets intertwined with the actual things being done.

I struggle with just like everyone else.  I feel sad when I see it in other people, too.

What can we do alter the focus we tend to slide towards, from what can't do to what we can do?