In this short Life that only lasts an hour How much - how little - is within our power ~Emily Dickinson
On a gorgeous morning in South Carolina, exactly one year ago, I stood on the beach barely able to move, wondering how I’d get myself back to my car. I had just witnessed a sunrise that colored the sky in pink and orange and had cast its colors over the edge of the water and shoreline. All of my favorite parts of starting my morning on the beach were in place: gulls swooped overheard, a line of pelicans flew just above the surface of the ocean, shells were plentiful and people sparse. Energized by the day, I quickened my walk to a run. It was true that I had only begun to walk longer distances since my illness, but if I take it slow, I thought, I can get back to who I was before. Within a short time, it hit—pain shot through my hip and stopped me in my tracks. I walked a bit, tried again, convinced it was a fluke. It wasn’t a fluke—my whole leg from the hip down seized. The next time I stopped, I wasn’t sure I could even walk.
I don’t know that I gave much thought to living within limitations for most of my life. I subscribed to the idea that enough work, enough fortitude and determination, enough grit and focus, could take me past most hurdles and allow me to accomplish most goals. Yoga postures that initially I couldn’t move into or sustain, I met with an attitude of gumption—enough practice and I would learn to master these poses. Business difficulties needed more creativity and longer hours. Issues with my kids or marriage could be tackled by reading the right books, discovering the right combination of tools to love and push these people toward what I deemed right and necessary. I couldn’t have named it then, but I was living my life as if it could be mastered. And I was teaching others from this same mindset.
Living within limitations and adapting to life as it is, people as they are, wasn’t something I chose to understand. Not initially, at least. Not for a while, and in all honesty, still not sometimes.
Life met me with sudden death, over and again, with illness that seemed to strip me of much of what I knew of myself, with a teenager struggling with mental and physical well being on top of learning challenges, with a business that needed to close. One unplanned event after another and suddenly, it was either adapt and live within limitations or struggle endlessly, suffer continually.
For a time, not consciously, I chose suffer and struggle. I don’t know about you, friend, but for me living with limitations came for me, said to me, this is the only way you can live.
Author Brittany Collins, who was featured recently in The Isolation Journals, writes, “Coming to terms with losses and gains is the task of a lifetime…I now realize that fortitude sometimes presents, on the surface, as fragility. When my body was at its weakest, my spirit had to become strong. And through that adaptation—learning to live within limitation—I turn to the world with different eyes.”