Capacity and Application
January 10, 2024
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
Watching: Fargo (season 5, though every season has been just stunningly good)(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status via email or in the comments)
Capacity and Application
I tend to believe that a life well lived (by most standards) involves a consistent increase in one’s personal capacity.
In practice, this means we’re more capable of doing and feeling and comprehending: fixing things, parsing the unfamiliar, understanding our internal roilings and surges, and gainfully soaking up aesthetic experiences
That growth in capacity, though, will generally need to be matched by a concomitant increase in application, lest we find ourselves with a volume of potential that goes underutilized or completely unrecognized.
So as we grow, we’re also responsible for figuring out ways to exercise our newly developed or recently discovered metaphorical (or literal) muscles; otherwise we begin to feel unchallenged and unchanging, and a lack of productive utility for these fresh facets of ourselves can leave us prone to a sense of neglect and uncomfortable fixedness.
This isn’t always a welcome realization, as our ongoing need for new challenges is a responsibility that can also weigh on us in various ways, sparking anxiety and exhaustion.
But a balanced, sustainable sequence of ever-enriching capacities, paired with an aligned use of those capacities, tends to result in satisfaction and fulfillment rather than depletion.
A mismatch between what we’re capable of and what we’ve tasked ourselves with tends to lead to the worst outcomes: that gulf between what we can do and what we’re doing can make us feel weird and uncomfortable.
Sometimes we overcompensate, piling more onto our plates than we can humanly handle, but just as often the opposite is true and the only way to rouse oneself is to better calibrate capability with application, taking on more of the right kind of responsibility and benefitting from the consequent sense of accomplishment and self-control.
Interesting & Useful
“Artist Duke Riley is attuned to this history and its modern-day implications. He gathers laundry detergent jugs, flip-flops, and bottles that once held household products once they wash up near beaches and carves incisive allegories and ornamentation into their surfaces. Painted in a warm, grainy beige, the scavenged waste mimics the whale bones traditional to scrimshaw while the artist’s signature wit emerges through the contemporary narratives of oil barons or marine creatures carrying human trash.”
Retro Kitchens of the Future: Discovering the Dream Kitchens of Yesteryear
“One of the key elements of the retro kitchens of the future was the integration of automation and smart features. Household appliance manufacturers imagined a world where kitchens would be equipped with sophisticated gadgets and labor-saving devices. Futuristic refrigerators offered automatic ice dispensers, adjustable temperature controls, and even voice-activated functions. Built-in ovens boasted programmable settings, ensuring precise cooking and baking results. Dishwashers became more efficient and quieter, while automatic coffee makers promised freshly brewed cups of java with a mere press of a button.”
“The Sweden Solar System is the world's largest permanent scale model of the Solar System. The Sun is represented by the Avicii Arena in Stockholm, the second-largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic Sea. The model represents the Solar System on the scale of 1:20 million.”
Outro
It’s finally snowing here in Milwaukee, and it’s looking like we’ll be getting some negative temperatures this upcoming weekend (as part of a larger cold front rolling through the low-48 states).
I love cold weather, and I’m enjoying bundling up for my skin-chapping daily walks and watching the snow fall out my living room window while writing (not looking forward to driving on the icy-roads, but I’m trying not to think about that yet, and I fortunately don’t have to drive very often).
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