Why range narrows.
You could, at some point in the past, do things you can no longer do. This is not news. What’s worth noticing is how quietly most of it happened.
Some losses are vivid. An injury, an illness, a moment you can point to. But most range doesn’t disappear like that. It recedes. You stop sitting on the floor because chairs are easier. You stop writing by hand because typing is faster. You stop estimating distances because your phone will tell you. One day you try to sit cross-legged and find you can’t, and you’re not sure when that happened, or if you ever could, or whether it matters.
It matters.
We are not just minds. We are not just bodies. We are both, together, and both narrow over time. The hand you don’t write with forgets how. The eye you don’t close loses its independence. The imagination you don’t task with picturing the underside of a table stops being able to do it. These are not injuries. They’re atrophies. Small, silent, untracked.
Why does range narrow? Age is part of it, but not the interesting part. The interesting part is habit. The interesting part is convenience. The interesting part is that we are exquisitely efficient at finding the path of least resistance and then wearing it into a groove so deep we forget there were other paths.
Children don’t have this problem. A child will draw with their left hand for no reason. They’ll walk along a wall instead of beside it. They’ll spin until they fall over. They have not yet learned that there is a correct way to do things, an efficient way, a way that looks competent to adults. They haven’t developed a fear of doing things badly.
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We have. Somewhere along the way, we learned to optimise. The wellness industry takes this fear and monetises it: be stronger, be faster, be more flexible, be better. Track your progress. Measure your gains. Prove you’re improving.
But that’s not awareness performance, not range. And it misses the thing that matters, which is not whether you can beat yesterday but whether you’ve noticed what you’ve quietly stopped being able to do at all.
The loss that should unnerve us is the one we don’t detect. The capability that slips away silently. The movement we used to make that we no longer make, the thought we used to think that we no longer think, the sense we used to use that we no longer use. We only notice when we reach for it and find it gone and by then, all too often, we can’t get it back.
What would it mean to notice earlier? Not to fix, not to train, not to optimise, but just to notice. To be occasionally confronted with a small, unfamiliar demand and discover whether you can meet it. Not as a test. Not as a programme. Just as information.
I built a small thing to do this. It issues infrequent instructions. Sometimes one a day, sometimes silence. Each instruction is small and doable without preparation. It doesn’t care if you do it. It won’t track whether you did. It doesn’t adapt. It doesn’t escalate. It simply points, now and then, at a capability you may or may not still have, and leaves you to notice.
It’s called Span Check. If you’re curious, it’s here: https://laurencetimms.github.io/span-check/index.html
What you do with what you notice is up to you.
— Laurence
