In the last video, I talked about how we are stuck within a bubble somehow, necessarily, because we can only pay attention to certain things, and we can’t really pay attention to everything in the universe, so we’re always gonna be inside some kind of very restricted part of the univers.
And part of this is because of this idea of limited attention, that we simply are not able to pay attention to more things.
But it seems like there’s so many different reasons that lead us to be restricted to a small range of what we could be and another one is that really we have so much power, we have so much potential, the possibilities of what we can do are absolutely frightening.
We have the ability at any moment to do great things, to do terrible things, to do completely ridiculous things, to do completely boring and disappointing things.
We have this potential, and potential is frightening, because potential is the unknown.
It’s something beyond what we can understand, and that is frightening.
And it’s also frightening because if we really can do so many things, we can really do so much with this time we have with our lives then it seems like anything we do that is less than that potential is really disappointing.
It’s like wow, you know, every person who lives could be doing great, amazing things.
And yet, most people, perhaps, you could say are not.
Even though we don’t have to define great things as just, you know, grand historical achievements.
Even living a simple life of an unknown person who just is very caring towards the people around, really improving the local area, simply through everyday actions making the world a little bit better for the people around: that in itself can be great.
That can be a great life and a great achievement, you could say.
And yet, so many people fall short of living what they can be.
In fact, maybe everybody.
Maybe everybody falls short, because the potential is so giant that it’s just not possible to actually reach this potential fully, you might argue.
So anytime we think about this great potential that we have in our lives, it’s always mixed with this sense of disappointment, of failure, that “I am not reaching my potential.
I am doing less than I can.” Now, I think we can help this by making a good definition of how we want to use our potential.
It’s infinite.
We can see a near-infinite potential.
Within the limits of the time of our lifespan and the space that we can live and move in, we really can do almost anything imaginable, and in fact, things that aren’t even imaginable until they’ve been done.
But within that, we can choose to narrow that range, so that “Oh, OK I’m not going to make great achievements in this direction.
I’m not going to achieve in that direction.” Of all these possibilities, as we get older, we start to get some sense of what we want to do with our lives, even if in the slightest way.
We can start to eliminate some of these possibilities, so that “Oh, I’m not going to be this.
I’m not going to be that.” That is shrinking.
That is our potential shrinking down, as we choose to limit it in order that we can more usefully deal with it.
So that seems to be the useful way to put limits on our potential.
But there’s also the less useful way, in that it’s simply frightening to imagine the hugeness of what we could possibly do, of good and bad things, that putting these borders around the possible, putting a limit on our possible achievements, helps to allay that feeling and make the everyday a little more tolerable.
So here’s another way that we put a limit on the infinite possibility of our lives.
So this is just an idea, that I’m still thinking about this and what it really means.
But somehow it seems like each of us is an unlimited potential, that we somehow choose to define where the edges of that potential are, and maybe it’s in how we do that that determines how we live.
#toomuchpotential #lifepotential #potential