Limitations

 Don’t sail out farther than you can row back.  Danish proverb

This is another gem from Insight Timer which greeted me this morning when I set my meditation countdown. It seems perfectly appropriate for me to consider, because we all have limits: limits to what we can achieve physically and emotionally, limits on our time and talents, and limits due to unforeseen circumstances.

What are my limits? I need to acknowledge them in order to recognize when I’ve reached them. Otherwise, I get to the place of banging my head against a proverbial brick wall. That’s no fun, but that’s what happens when I start thinking that I am equal to challenges for which I’m not. If someone asked me to help them pour and finish concrete, I could study all the YouTube videos possible, and I still wouldn’t be up to the task. There’s no way I could be a Contractor—I have no interest in learning all the ins and outs of that job. Engineer, pilot, nurse, home remodeler, brain surgeon—these things are obvious. What about the small daily challenges? Am I up to them?

On any given day, I have to assess my pain level. I have limits I need to recognize in order to keep it under control. I may have a high credit limit, but my personal accounting tells me that my spending must be limited to what I can pay, not to what some algorithm says I could, which would only end up with the issuer making money off of me while keeping me indebted to them indefinitely. No thank you.

I’ve learned lessons of the importance of limits through hard trial and many errors. While I still find myself beyond some reasonable limits, I’m better today at recognizing the difference between pipe-dream and reality.

Limits, it turns out, are valuable things, rather than ‘I dare you’ challenges. I’m grateful to find that there is an importance difference between what I can achieve and what is best left to others.