positive dwelling in inability:
[Credit to a few people for a few ideas herein.]
In some cultures or social milieus, there's sort of a feeling, a vibe that anything reminisicient of "inability," "can't," "lack of capacity," "lack of capability" is definitely somehow bad.
"From the outside," that might be something perhaps like "excuses and procrastination are shameful and weak," or, perhaps, "not being team player, being a downer."
"From the inside," there might be a reasonable concern that dwelling on "can'ts" and "won'ts" might somehow be a self-fulfilling prophecy, somehow self-curtailing, settling, giving up, or possibly even dangerously demotivating, given one's life situation or circumstances. A rule might be gisted like "you shouldn't admit to limitations even to yourself," let alone coworkers(?), authority figures(?), peers(?).
"you shouldn't admit to limitations even to yourself"—-with respect to other people, sometimes that's the right call. With respect to oneself, it's a functional strategy, for some people, sometimes, in the short-term.
But, (possibly very) long-term, this becomes problematic:
Because, the experience of direct, felt, visceral, "can't," "no idea how," "confused," "lacking in capability," "completely lacking in know-how," means that you've fully unlayered and exposed a labile surface area--which means that it can now change, learn, and grow directly. (Sometimes stuff is stuck around it, maybe long chains of stuck stuff, so those all might have to untangle first, but in a vacuum, it can now change, learn, and grow directly.)
It's long-run critical to patiently "bring to the surface," untwist, find, find one's way inside, feel into, these patches, pockets, voids, "don't know" voids, sparse models, sparse content, sparse (surfaces) areas, childhood (surface) areas, patterns, propensities. (Often, maybe usually, the best way to do that is through surrender and allowing and patience.)
Unfortunately, one thing that can happens when we first realize the "power" of meditation is that we start furiously "building," "adding," "creating," etc. (to the detriment of the above [1,2] --- that is, untwirling and exposing and then being patient for "truly bottom-up fill-in" is generally (almost always) the right thing to do versus "[active] building" in or on top of). But we're usually not doing that building in quite the right "place" in the bodymind (see previous parenthetical).
Initially, there can be plenty of slack for what we build to kind of move around and settle, to find better "places." But, places that are shut away can't participate in this shuffling, and places that are shut away can sort of become fixed points, fixed/stuck places that then get "wrapped around" which, over time, takes slack out of the system and makes future changes slower and more complicated. [3] Eventually one has to find one's way all the way back. (There are can be suble and overt lead indicators that something is going wrong, like learning becoming effortful or increases in muscle tension.)
In some sense an exposed surface area is almost definitionally not a fixed point. And no fixed points, no constraints, very, very, very, very loosely speaking, sort of can participate in "unlimited slack" (in part because they can be sort of ongoingly revised, cf. redo-to-undo, in kind of ongoing global harmonization [qualifying that global is always local changes]).
So why is this so hard? Or why don't we automatically do this? Well we do! But for the hardest, deepest, oldest stuff, sometimes we need lots of meditation.
These places get sealed off or buried or pushed away in the first place because, for whatever reason, they (rightly or wronging, temporarily, transiently, or challengingly) inability seemingly implied something really, really, really bad, say, even "critically bad," unthinkable, beyond the pale. Perhaps not knowing how to do something (seemingly) implied being socially ostracized, or ending up homeless, or losing one's romantic partner, or permanently losing out on a lucrative career, and so on.
Given that, or the distant memory or impression of that, the bodymind might not let oneself find one's way back to that inability or not knowing (or that vulnerability, immaturity, lack, lack of safety, cluelessness, simple youth, innocence, something).
So the first step is sometimes "pre-handling all possible outcomes," all possible worlds, including the ones where one never learns how to become able to do that thing (and this can be and often is, wholly tacit, wholly patiently implicitly already handled). Once "any world is ok," then it's harmless to expose that surface area.
Easier said than done, of course! And that's why one might need thousands of hours of global wayfinding, and that's ok. Often it's not pre-handling all possible outcomes, but one kind of slider-puzzles in that general direction, solving all sorts of things along the way. Sometimes problems dissolve instead of get solved, etc.
Of course, the irony is that deeply, gently, patiently dwelling in inability is usually the fastest way to acquire the ability. There's a deep and direct phenomenological/functional thing, here, but, more conventionally, it gives us permission to be dumb, at least in our own heads, to be silly, to be stupid, to experiment, to play. Sometimes this goes along with it being safe to ask questions to expose our likely transient and temporary inability to other people. That can be a tremendous accellerant, if safe.
Sometimes it's lots of other stuff besides pure inability, pure don't know, don't know how. Sometimes there's "can't tell," sometimes there's "won't", and much more. Sometimes there's long chains and skeins and threads and twists, all throughout the system, a great deal of the bodymind, that one has to untangle, unthread, untwist (often effortlessly, spontaneously, over hours and months and sometimes years). This is "impossible" ("insoluble") problem territory, though likely actually solvable and if not solvable then dissolvable.
(And sometimes it comes with transient emotional and behavioral aspects, sometimes easy to spot, sometimes things that take you over completely, that can last a couple seconds, ten minutes, more rarely an hour or a day---ancient freakout, ancient out-of-control-ness, impulsivity, impulsivity-with-teeth, everything-is-bad, I'm-fucked, and so on. One gets better at safely managing things like this as they come up, though often it comes up before we're aware it's come up, and sometimes contexts, environments, and support can help. Some more gentle and expansive things, surface areas, can take days or weeks, or longer, to sort of "integrate" or "fill-in," which arguably is never complete. The less "active" this is, the more deeply, exquisitely patient and receptive this process is, probably the better.)
(Again, it can be hard, again and again. Because say you're almost really good at talking with people in almost all situations, but there's a few ways in which your approach is disastrous. Finding your way to something better might mean finding your way back to a wide, hidden space that doesn't know how to talk to people at all. So suddenly you're finding yourself flailing in situations that would have previously been easy and fun; because you've found your back to this older place. But that older place almost always has much more potential than your newer, mostly better yet somehow sharply limited thing. So if you can wait it out, and often this is very important because not doing so can bottleneck future progress, eventually that older place of not knowing will sort of spontaneously, slowly, patiently gently start to learn, and eventually, too, it will be able to make use of all the newer, more recent stuff that it wasn't able to make use of at first, and eventually you'll end up with something overall more effortless that has all the benefit of what you'd most recently been doing but with fewer and fewer of that things flaws. So, long-run, you get to keep everything good that you've got, plus even better things, making use, too, of that older, bigger more flexible place that had been sort of sealed away---better after that initial nonmonotonicity, all things being equal[, modulo aging, misfortune, etc., etc., etc.])
*
Often a big piece of all the above is self-warmth, self-compassion, self-alignment, and, indeed, self-acceptance, loosely and generally speaking.
There's the paradox mentioned above, where self-acceptance can be scary because it can sometimes initially dangerously feel like that would be self-curtailment or giving up. Self-acceptance and self-curtailment can be untangled (not to reify either of those). One can be self-accepting and still have love, fire, passion, excellence (more and more self-defined, in any case, in part because one becomes less and less afraid of accidently moving their own goalposts or pegging excellence to false idols, as it were)--this is something perhaps like "sovereignty."
There comes to be a sort of earned self-confidence an ease--that doesn't necessarily mean every problem as initially conceived will be solvable; problems will redefine and flow and get discarded for better ones. Though, capability does go up and up. Not insta-capability--that's often a fantasy, but the ability to steadily move towards ever-nuancedly-redefined competence and success, as challenges present themselves, no matter the all-in-all conditions on the ground (though, rather, completely taking into account all conditions on the ground), including proactive renegotiation with intimate partners, community-members, etc.
All in all, all of this, can sometimes be glossed as "becoming more yourself." This is sort of paradoxical and equivocating, but it points to something delicate and important.
When we try to be other people, out of desperation, jealousy, envy, etc., there's typically something that subtly goes wrong. It's ok to learn from other people, of course, to experimentally emulate, etc. But when we try to become other people, that's often problematic.
But when we become accepting of ourselves, over time, non-self-hating, non-self-attacking, slowly, slowly, then we can become exactly who we are and ever more ourselves. We can become more ourselves, ever more. And, in the end, it always turns out to be something way, way, way better than the (often illusory) thing we saw in that other person, the non-obvious tradeoffs that they were making, the things that they don't actually get to have, and so on.
And again, paradoxically, becoming more ourselves isn't settling but in fact is "getting exactly what we want," paradoxically, never perfectly, amidst sorrow and loss and hardship, but also better than we could have possibly imagined, tailored just for us, and by our own hand, in radical self-alignment, in participation and surrender with the world.