#stuff that i dont think of as particularly remarkable or straining

[tomathi]

so I work in a garden right? which means I do a lot of repetitive manual labor, which means I have a lot of time to think about human physicality, and I realized something recently that I really love about our species. We are both contextually very physically strong and contextually very weak.

Compared to the other great apes we aren't even a little bit strong, like in terms of hard data the other species blow us out of the water. There's some commonly thrown about numbers like "gorillas can lift ten times their body weight" and "chimps are five times stronger than humans." There's also some scuttlebutt about whether those numbers are accurate or just easily deployed factoids for zoo tour groups, but that's neither here nor there. Have you seen the arms on even an average chimp? fucken diesel bro.

But what really intrigues me is the way that humans apply our strength. Like ok an ape can probably rip my arm off without too much trouble, but if you asked a crew of four of them to shovel a couple tons of mulch in fifteen minutes, you'd be out of luck. But me and my coworkers do that all day every day and barely break a sweat.

And yea, mulch shoveling isn't really down to raw power, it's down to communication and pitchforks and wheelbarrows and thumbs, but I guess that's what I'm getting at. We're not built for feats of strength, but we have enough muscle up our sleeves that, when combined with our semi-innate understanding of physics, our hyper developed thermoregulation tools and a bit of persistence, we just go around achieving them anyway.

Like your average moving guy who lives off cheap beer and gas station food (said with all the respect in the world, same boat brother) can unload a fridge that weighs more than they do from the back of a truck with no help and no trouble. Just cause they know what they're doing and they do it a lot. And then all the way up at the end of the scale, you get exceptionally strong humans who can squat a car and pull a fucken airplane. Just cause they practiced a bunch and ate like 10k calories a day. That's insane. And sorta beautiful.

The way the world is right now it's easy to walk around feeling weak, surrounded by concrete and steel, underneath systems that are so deeply entrenched and enforced from such a distance that they seem immutable, asked to face forces that are so utterly beyond our individual power it's laughable. So in this moment I am really treasuring living a life which reminds me of the fact that we are blessed with a beautifully balanced pairing of raw strength and the ability to bring that strength to bear. And of the fact that you do not need to be built great to achieve great things.