Living our limits

What we can and cannot do—and why the chasm between is holy

I didn’t plan to skip a week’s worth of Substacks. But once in a while life catches up and gives you what you didn’t know you needed. My time offline lit up a truth that the present season keeps revealing over and over: I need do to less to do better. For me, for my soul, and for my work. These words were born from a week away.

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I see my life most clearly when I step away. Vacation, retreat, even one quiet hour in a coffee shop can be enough to catch my breath and catch what I’ve been missing.

Years ago I posted on Instagram:

If memory serves, the responses of my unscientific poll came back 75% yes, 25% no.

Now I pay closer attention to what questions, conversations, or concerns arise when I get an hour or a day to step back and step away. This week I could not stop thinking about limits.

How hard they are. How necessary. How they define what it means to be human.

Speed limits. Spending limits. Limits of time, energy, resources, ability, or interest—all of them meet you at the door whenever you leave home. Post-cancer I keep wrestling with my own need to say no, to go slow, and to honor my body’s limitations. I want to do it all, see it all, try it all, love it all—because I am alive, because I got to survive, because I am still here.

But limits define a life.

This time I was not alone in realizing that truth. Among the limiting lessons my offspring learned (or relearned) on this trip:

• If you spend all your money, you will have none left.

• If you eat only junk food, you will feel sick.

• If you stay up all hours, you will crash the next day.

None of these are surprising. Each one has been learned the hard way by every one of us, haven’t they? Bodies, minds, and souls have hard limits. When we surpass them, we suffer.

The simplest example, brought to you by bucket lists and glossy brochures: you cannot visit everywhere on vacation. Each day you must pick and choose, leaving behind what is undone, unseen, untasted, and untried. I tell my children when they mourn the end of a trip, “Whatever we didn’t do this time, that’s your reason to come back!” (Even when I know we might never return.)

But how sweet, to savor what we did share: time together, time in beauty, time apart. Best of all, much of the week was spent without WiFi. Without cell service. With family. With nature.

We used to live like this, all the time.

(It might have been better when we did.)

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When you were 18 or 22, and the world made sharp sense to your steely eyes, and you had life pretty well figured out, the sky was the limit. But as Jesus told Peter when they sat together on the beach, two middle-aged friends who had learned what it meant to surrender and suffer, “Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.”¹

The rope around your waist is a limit. The nature of your mortal body is a limit. The precarity of our brutal world is a limit.

Yet the paradox of limits is the freedom found within. When you marry, you say yes to one person, forsaking all others. You might never taste the spark of first love again, but you enter into the sweetness of long-seasoned love. When you choose one job and not another, you can do good work within it, knowing you do not need to do the rest.

The limits of what we can do will save us. Because if we are God, we do not need God.

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Creativity requires constraints. Unfettered time and space can be overwhelming. Endless possibilities leave the page blank, the canvas bare, the cursor blinking. Who hasn’t stared out the window consumed by the pressing panic of knowing you could but not knowing how you can?

I loved being offline this week. I always love being offline when I step away. A sobering lesson for a Very Online Writer. Any time I clicked open the apps to check something quick, I felt worse after. Too much bad news, too much chaos, too much vertigo between extremes. Each time I clicked everything close, relief resurged. I checked the news once a day—or not at all. My thoughts were clearer, my anxiety softer, my body stronger.

(I am writing all this down for myself. An attempt to remember.)

When we can do or say or be anything online, it is not healthy for us. Without guardrails, a car careens off the cliff. So we set limits. We choose where or how or when or what. We say no, which is another way of saying yes.

Whenever I get the chance to go on retreat, I adore the simplicity of sparse living. A single bed. A desk and chair. One towel. One meal time. Nothing more, nothing less.

You can live like this. You can live like this.

If I want to continue to be a writer online—no, if I want to be a human being in this digital, dizzying, destructive era—I need to rediscover the limits that let me flourish. Even in a decade of dismal news and the dismantling of institutions I hold dear, I cannot overload my brain and my body in the name of calling or compassion or creativity.

How good it is to center down.²

How good it is to do nothing and then rest after.³

Spotted in the wild at quirky coffee shop on vacation.

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Social media would love us to believe we are endless. Ours is the era of unlimited scroll. You used to reach the end of Instagram. “No new posts! You’re all caught up!” Now you can feast forever. An all-you-can-eat buffet, open 24/7.

You used to follow your friends and enjoy only their updates. Now every feed will spoon you strangers’ screeds and sponsored posts without end. YouTube will keep playing videos till you (or your batteries) die.

Much digital ink has been spilled to lament that our brains were not built to take in the overload of information we currently ingest. In a single day we consume more information than most humans on Earth would have taken in within their lifetime.⁴

As soon as I heard about the Texas floods, I felt the tug: I should get online, I should say something, I should speak to the suffering, I should rally people to help. “Should” ranks among my least favorite words in the English language; I try to avoid it at all costs. So whenever it sneaks into my psyche, alarm bells go off.

No. I do not need to do anything, besides prayer. I am away, out of the office, and out of town. Plenty of people can rally the helpers.⁵ Prophetic voices abound everywhere.⁶

Not a single thing in the world depends on me. Thank God for that.

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Thomas Merton said “Take more time. Cover less ground.”⁷ Whenever I remember his words, I misquote them in my mind: Take less time. Cover more ground. A telling Freudian slip.

Living a limited life is holy labor. I’m chagrined to be a slow study in this School of Basic Humanity. But the ground of humility is dark fertile humus, the sacred earth where humor and holiness intertwine their holy roots. If you can learn to laugh at your own limits, you can hold them closer.

By this point in an essay—un essai in the French tradition, only an attempt or a try—an author must know what she is about.⁸ If life itself is an essai, then mid-life is a pit stop. The halfway point to slow down, pull over, stretch your legs, refuel, and figure out where you’re going next.

So my point in this pit stop must be clear:

We have limits. We are limits. And precisely within these limits, we find our purpose.

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The kids went fishing on the last day of vacation. Three generations of family, standing knee-deep in the river, casting in the hopes of catching.

When we limit out, we’ll come back, they told us when they left. As photos of grinning triumphs and trophy catches poured into my phone, their words rang in my ears.

When we limit out, we’ll be done. We have to stop. We can only do so much.

When will we hit our limits? How will we change once we do? Do we dip into social media once a day and stop marinating within it for hours? Can we find a time of day that works to check the news—as when the evening post arrived with enough headlines for a human to consume before dinner—instead of slipping into the endless seduction of breaking news and live updates? Can we return to our three feet of influence and start to act within the needs of our neighborhood?⁹

The difference between what we can do and what we cannot do is not a chasm of our own failure. It is the holy design of humanity.

We have limits. We are limits. Within our limits, we find our purpose.

1. John 21:18.

2. Howard Thurman.

3. Spanish proverb.

4. You have seen more faces than any of your ancestors before you.

5. My friend Kathryn Whitaker helped raise over $35,000 for Kerr County, TX, this week. She’s directing folks to donate to Catholic Charities of San Antonio for ongoing relief efforts after the deadly flooding.

6.

Sharon McMahon

is one of the most prophetic voices of our time. Pay attention to what she is saying about how dehumanization is leading to the destruction of democracy.

7. Another essay on the same words from Merton.

8. The Wikipedia page on essay is well worth a read. For example, “As with the novel, essays existed in Japan several centuries before they developed in Europe with a genre of essays known as zuihitsu—loosely connected essays and fragmented ideas. Zuihitsu have existed since almost the beginnings of Japanese literature.”

9. A phrase I learned from Sharon Salzberg.