According to the "all-knowing" wikipedia, "Capacity is the ability to hold, receive or absorb, or a measure thereof." It seems also fitting to apply to it a persons ability to deal with life (work, struggle, family, relationships, pain, etc.) I have many times contemplated my own capacity... How much life, can I handle... at what point would I feel like I was trying to live beyond my human frame.
A few random thoughts about capacity:
1. It is one of the tenants of humanity... we have a fixed ability which can only be multiplied, leveraged, and maximized to a fixed point. Different people having seemingly endless capacities, but this is really an illusion of comparison... they may have a higher capacity than some, but are not unlimited.
2. One of the chief differentiators about God's nature, is that he is without a limit in capacity. His limitless nature (power, wisdom, love, ability, holiness) is what makes him of a totally different kind than humans... In this way, we cannot truly understand even the concept of God... he is not a SUPER being who has a SUPER capacity in regard to strength or Power... he is an unlimited being who has limitless power and ability.
3. God understands human limits because he created them. We are dust he shaped with the ability to experience life, but only the life apportioned to us from Heaven. Even a concept like the Sabbath is a reflection of this... God made it for man, to ensure we did not exceed our capacity, and forget about him in the process. The title also helps us to reflect that we have limited resources which cannot sustain us. Giving back a portion of them allows us to remember that ultimately God's limitless resources are our true source of life.
4. I have a capacity which I cannot exceed no matter how hard I try. About economic capacity, Wikipedia makes a further point:
Capacity (economics), the point of production at which a firm or industry's average (or "per-unit") costs begin to rise, usually because some factor is fixed (often capital or land).
This is true with all who approach their max capacity. The close we get to our limit, it seems that out effectiveness begins to wane. Richard Swenson talks about this in his book Margins. His idea is that we need margins on our page, so that if life does not go exactly the way that we plan, that we have a little extra space to adjust. A no brainer, that I am sadly unable to apply in my life.
5. I have struggled with eyes that are bigger than my capacity all of my life. I am fascinated by too many things, and usually can figure out how to do almost anything to some degree. This has regularly led me to pursue more tasks and things, than I could maintain without starting to resent things like sleep and downtime. Through my life, I have generally been able to learn to leverage my skills and ambition in a way that leveraged my capacity enough to "up my game" when required. I have learned that my capacity is greater than I imagined, and rather than using my extra to create margin, have quite often filled it with more tasks, relationships, and other things which require maintenance.
6. As a high capacity person, people are always looking for you... they recognize your capacity, and want you to apply it to their tasks... It goes without saying that this adds to the capacity conundrum.
7. I have recently related my struggles with capacity to compound interest on a credit card. If you are not careful with your plastic, you may 'Discover' that you have spent so much money that your payments do not even cover the interest on what you owe... That even as you make payments on your credit, interest is accumulating against you that is being added to the principle of what you owe... You are on the wrong side of the exponential curve. Capacity too, when exceeded, can create an to-do list that doesn't reduce your load at all, but mere pays some interest as the load continues to increase.
I think I have been dwelling on this a lot recently because of three things in my life. I just bought a new house; Emily and I are having a baby crazy soon; my summer working at Elmbrook has been both Crazy awesome and Crazy busy.
By all trustworthy reckonings a Baby will change everything... so I am left wondering where I will find the capacity... I know I don't have any more as a human, which means the Baby will require me to transfer capacity from somewhere else. Perhaps I will be able to find great efficiency somewhere, but more likely I just need to make better decisions, and become more focused on few things.
Limiting decisions are always the hardest, but usually the most important that we make.
This presentation is from Garr Reynolds of presentation zen, and it is full of good technique. I am posting it here both to remind me of some of his techniques, and to remind to to figure out how he posted this online so I can put some of mine up too...
