At the core of the Theory of Everyone is the idea that reality must be understood through capacity. That is to say we take measure of the world using the yardstick of possibility – can do, can’t do, may be able to do someday. Ultimately, it is an optimistic vision that responds to the chronic underweighting of the may be able to someday with an attitude of expansion, exploration and possibility. The Theory of Everyone sees capacity as both vein and lifeblood, a branching system of possibility and potential energy. This necessitates that the theory have a realism, a sense of what is true. Just as Hawking built on Bohr to get a sense of reality in quantum physics, the Theory of Everyone builds on philosophical and social scientific realities laid out by previous generations of scholars, Karen Barad’s agential realism chief among them.
When we ask if something is real or not real, what we are asking is whether the world, the cosmos, the universe has the capacity to be a given way, unfold in a particular manner, to exist in a certain configuration at a certain point in space-time. This means that when asking what is real we must ask what is possible, whether the capacity exists to create the conditions and configurations of any given reality. Likewise, given that capacity, just as the universe is constantly expanding we must ask if the potential to create the conditions for any given reality will ever exist.
I learned this lesson before my sixth birthday from an unlikely source in an unlikely place – a Polish physiotherapist in a military-style physical therapy and rehabilitation center on the outskirts of the Polish port city of Gdansk. I was at the center to save my ability to walk. A New York doctor had noticed that the way I compensated as I got around was affecting my gait, and my gait, in turn, threatened to turn my cartilage to dust. At his recommendation my mother flew me across the Atlantic to the center, the brainchild of a soviet doctor and veteran of the USSR’s space program.
The fact that he was a Soviet space man is no minor detail. Those first intrepid space-explorers were in the business of doing the impossible, to, quite literally, go where no man had gone before. To be a pioneer, to expand the horizon requires ruthless dedication to a vision. As such, space programs are steeped in a militaristic culture infused with a single-minded dedication to the impossible.
This military ethos seeped out of every crack and crevice in the spartan facility. The atmosphere was dense with ruthless purpose. There was no chit-chat, no playful banter, rather, the heavy silence of purpose was draped over the facility like a blanket. Even the normally joyous experience of food was stripped of levity. Vacuum packed, microwaved, reheated and soulless – not even lunch offered a respite from the operativeness of the place. Were it not for the gravity it may well have been the dark side of the moon.
The therapists embodied the same cold commitment to the impossible. There were swarms of them, all natives of this or that eastern European country. They brought the chill of their homelands into the center. They were its icy appendages, twisting, torquing, forcing my body into positions that seemed wholly unnatural, strapping me into harnesses fixed to metal cages, holding muscle groups in place for a relentlessly focused assault of therapy. They worked like a chorus, basses, trebles; legs, arms, and how I dreaded their awful harmony.
I felt like Ham, the intrepid chimpanzee blasted into space on the head of an Atlas rocket. I was hooked up to straps and levers. I was poked and prodded. I was measured and tested. I was utterly out of my element. Monkeys are at home in the jungle and my disability was my jungle. This gaggle of therapists had torn me from my habitat and put me in training with rugged, ruthless, cold soviet space efficiency and I felt lost.
Everything about the place was alien to me – the bungee apparatuses that suspended me from the ceiling, the frostbitten foreign landscape, the teams of therapists with their jagged Slavic accents constantly poking and prodding, the grueling hours of therapy that seemed to stretch on endlessly day after day. The only thing I didn’t find alien was the alienation itself. Doctors had long been alienating me from my own potential. They set artificial limitations on my ability to survive, to speak, to think, to walk, to love, to be. This is a common experience in the disability community. Doctors prejudge the limits of a person’s potential capacity and thus add an additional mental (and, at times, logistical) barrier to fulfilling that capacity. This predefinition is wrong on two levels. First, it fails to account for the expanding and expansive nature of capacity. And second, it assumes that the patient can imagine themselves realizing whatever activity has been crossed off the list of the possible.
I was unable to construct any concept of my capacity and capacital limitations until I found out I couldn’t swing. This is because people need to see their effort converted into change. In order to feel alive we must be able to see the tangible effects of our agency on our own lives and on the world around us. To feel that our capacity can expand beyond its current limits we need to see how our growth manifests itself.
The first time I truly understood the way my effort affected my world and my reality was at the center. As my young mind couldn’t see the improvement nor the long-term benefits this intensive therapy wrought I was frustrated, wanting nothing more than to throw in the towel. My complaints were always met with the same phrase: “remove the word ‘can’t’ from your vocabulary”. Just as the chorus therapists worked on me with their dreadful harmony of torque and torsion, they incanted – nay screeched – this litany in near unison. I hated it. I hated it all. And worse than that, I found it silly. Of course there are things I can’t do. On one particularly grueling day a therapist launched the mantra at me. The words bit, and I bit back:
Can’t is a useful word, I contended, I can’t fly!
Oh no? Then how did you get here?
On a plane.
On a plane how?
Flying on a plane!
…
Oh.
I was caught, defeated. Even as a child I could see Socratic traps from a mile away yet here I was, baited into one by a therapist who spoke English as a second language. The feeling of defeat was disorienting, as if this alien center had finally blasted me into space. The shock got my gears turning.
My therapist was right, of course, there should be no limit to human endeavor. Yet here I was in an extremely restrictive training suit, literally bound by bungee cords to a steel cage. It seemed at first like a particularly cruel enactment of hypocrisy but I have come to learn that the tension I felt in that moment is profoundly special. Energy doesn’t just restrain itself, only by drawing back the bowstring can we shoot the arrow, only through the exercise of agency can energy be harnessed. My momentary restriction on movement, the tension held in those bungee cords, granted me the greater freedom of a lifelong ability to walk. The tension I felt within myself was a spring, the potential energy of capacity, being wound up, readying itself for my expansive future.
That physical therapist understood what dozens of doctors and nurses before her hadn’t. That possibility is ever expanding. When we refuse to acknowledge that reality we alienate people from their own ability. So dear reader, embrace the tension, remove can’t from your vocabulary, and endeavor to expand the horizons of possibility for yourself and others. In doing so you claim your share of a cosmic inheritance, a legacy passed through the ages from Pythagoras, to Galileo, to Einstein, to Hawking. You will be a pioneer, and embracer of the darkness. The crucible you cross will convert itself to your cradle and you will partake in that most life-actualizing form of sustenance, ability. Don’t allow unfulfilled capacity turn into hollow hunger, nourish your being on growth and ability.