Limits in a World That Erases Them

“There is a paradox to life that an acceptance of limits, borders, and boundaries can be the most liberating thing of all.”

Introduction

Our world is one where the very mention of boundaries, borders, limits is treated as akin to ushering in fascism or, at the very least, authoritarianism. The idea that we should not seek to overcome all things that stop us from achieving maximal freedom, autonomy and the flowering of our inner self is seen as absurd or downright dangerous. It is true that being too limited, investing and entrenching boundaries and borders too heavily, can indeed stifle and cause stagnation.

As always, the thing is to find balance through trial and error, to be grounded in humility and to learn both from individual experience and the systemic wisdom of the past. Limits are indeed a fact of life—no matter our own feelings as to this reality—but they are also desirable and necessary for a life well lived. The ultimate answer, Christopher Lasch found, is to find and retain hope through “connections to and reliance upon memory, virtue, limits, and humility, and, finally, of [it]s source in the spiritual discipline of religion.”

Limits and Life

With this as the end, let us lay the groundwork. The first thing to reckon with is that from birth our existence is bounded by limits we did not choose and which we had no say in. We did not choose when, where, or by whom we were born. We did not choose our physical attributes, our heritable temperament, or our inborn talents. We enter this world utterly dependent on our mothers most immediately and our fathers just behind—a dependence we return to in our twilight years when we enter what Shakespeare called our age of “second childishness.” Lasch saw children as the ultimate expression of our givenness, with “givenness…especially a feature of the relationship between parents and children: each child is a surprise, a gift, a unique, and unpredictable adventure, as well as a visible sign of one’s willingness to sacrifice much of one’s own personal preference and freedom.”