Day 12 (7WJ) – Upper Limits

In The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks writes about how we “upper limit ourselves”.  This happens when we are venturing beyond our comfort zone.  When things are so good that we begin to wonder if they are “too good”.  It is when we sit around waiting for the next shoe to drop.  Well, eventually it does and we hit a roadblock.  We come up against a barrier.  The result, we figure the difficulty is the way that things should be and we give up believing and trying for them to be different. In defeat, we allow ourselves to slide back to our comfort zone, within our “upper limit”.

For the past three weeks, I was doing a great job working out.  Whether at the gym or in my neighborhood I was walking, running, sprinting, biking for 45-60 minutes/day.  I felt great!  So great, that I ignored the growing discomfort in my foot.  And as a result, I’m in a whole lot of pain now.  If I let that upper limit get the best of me, I’d stop working out all together, defeated by an imagined opposition that I really caused.  It was my neglect for ignoring the signs and overdoing the workout.  It wasn’t a sign that I shouldn’t be working out.  Instead, it was a sign that I should listen to my body more.  Lesson learned.

When hit with upper limits often enough, I can believe them to be a message from the universe, designed to “keep me in my place.”  Then, I can lose my capacity for imagination.  Believing myself to be free of boundaries is not the same as being able to imagine myself in a different vision or reality.  One is the absence of painful conditions.  In the other, the conditions are different, changed.

I am actually finding this activity of viewing my conditions to be wonderful, to be very challenging.  I am always imagining the perfect in light of the imperfect present.  Instead, I’m trying to imagine the perfect in light of the infinitely impossible.  It’s a big goal!  Limitless possibilities!  Try it!  What does your idea of perfection without upper limits look like?