The limits to your abilities

Limits to your abilities

If you try hard enough you can achieve anything, say some. If you are a midget, two-foot-tall, you are extremely unlikely to beat the world high jump record. Not just unlikely, it is most improbable. Someone could try as hard as they can for years on end to beat records set down by other people. Despite the best training, the best running shoes and with the finest diet coupled with the most perseverance imaginable, they still fail. Most will not even come close. Your body has defined limitations. No matter how hard you push your body, it has a limit to what it can achieve.

There are maximums to your abilities, physical and mental. These limits are set out in your design. To reach the greatest potential you will need to be made right, right from conception. Those that reached their greatest potential came from mothers than ate well and didn’t get hampered by a polluted environment. The mental side of things counts as much as the physical. It takes a massive amount of practice, refinement, and doggedness to exploit your potential fully. The effort is the nurture, the design is the nature. It is all very well saying that someone could have got there if they tried harder, but they may have put everything they had into something and still fall short of expectations.

Your mind will be configured in a way that gives you excellence in certain thinking-based activities. It might appear to be more malleable than other physical constraints. However, your mental makeup has constraints regardless of its adaptability in the same way as you have a maximum stride length and limited running endurance. Certain drugs will enhance performance and increase the rate of improvement a bit. The boundaries of your design envelope can be pushed and stretched by artificial means. Some will go down this avenue ignoring the risk of a premature death.

Finding our limits requires resolve and perseverance. It is made harder by the fact that each increment of improvement gets ever smaller as we get closer to our limits. We get to a point where despite a massive amount of extra effort, only a small improvement is seen.

Finding yourself via trial and error is a long journey that begins with the understanding that your preferences can’t be changed, nor your affinities and there are limits to what you can achieve. It also means that you must get over any bad experiences that you may have along the way. The world changes but what we like does not. There may be people that you look up to and wish to beat or share the stage with, but sometimes, no amount of trying will see you get a chance of doing as well as them. Your affinities in the sexual sense are unchangeable. What you like is what you like.

“I still believe my preferences have changed over time.”

A hammer will do it. Smash yourself up, inadvertently or otherwise, and then yes, a preference can be damaged. What about If you lost your sense of smell, what happens then? Some unfortunate souls have indeed lost this fabulous sense when they caught the flu, and it never returned. Smell links with taste. Food no longer tastes of much and you are left with only texture to go by. How then can we still prefer strawberries over gooseberries?

A guillotine came down quickly, too quick for your reactions and you are without a hand. Prosthetics help. They are improving all the time, but it can alter what you want to do now, maybe spurring you on in a different direction with multiple upsides. The time wasted throwing javelins can now be spent on one handed golf. Actually, both are possible one handed. Preferences sit at your core. They are deep within you. They are infused deeply. To access them you need your sensory inputs. You need the physicality of your body to dovetail with the preferences inside you.

You are degrading daily. The more you degrade, the harder it is to explore things that are true to you. Being true to yourself is living the life you prefer, but that gets more difficult when you can no longer do what you could in the past.

If you look at preferences deeply you see that they don’t change. A current preference is not the same as a core preference. You can do something that contradicts your preferences because of convenience, to follow fashion or to satisfy another objective. It is harder to do something in keeping with our preferences if something else is on offer that doesn’t require travelling so far or is cheaper or because certain people make less preferable activities jolly fun. Ideally you would prefer it if you could join other fine people who share your joys and practice them in a location not too far away.

When you emerged from the birth canal or were whipped out narrowly missed by the sharpest scalpel, you begun the process of discovery. The milk, the warmth from being held tightly to the bosom of those cultivating you weighed far more than sexual activity you may have twenty years down the line. At that age you can hear a pin drop. Each year your hearing gets a little worse. You become deaf to high pitched sounds in your twenties. Your dexterity declines. There will be a time where you are at peak performance then every body function deteriorates. This impacts how you facilitate your preferences.

Preferences and physical ability may not align. You may be born with the capability to handle a flute with aplomb but detest every aspect of it. You may discover that you are quite good at something but still prefer doing something else. Preferences are both complex and quite straightforward. Sounds chime or grate with your molecules. Things resonate or jar. Certain scents will evoke passion and joy. Particular stories chime with you. Certain people slot in with your way of thinking. Lots of things register with those inbuilt preferences that were allotted to you at conception. Some keys will coincide with your locks. From that simple core it becomes a mush. Memories, experiences, exceptions, the weather, and who you are with. Lots of variable come into play. If you are with your girlfriend, you prefer to do x. If you are alone, you prefer to do y. So many factors that interact with your desire to do things. It gets complicated quite quickly. Preferences are at the bottom, deep inside you with lots stacked above making it seem unclear. What you prefer to do on a rainy day will be different to when the sun is shining. That doesn’t change what you would prefer to do in an ideal world.