I Don't Want to Find My Limits

Writing every day can’t be bad can it? What if it’s the same junk every day? Then, yeah, you’re doing something wrong. But it may be a symptom of a deeper problem. The inability to move forward, to be stuck, to generate new ideas may be a symptom of…what? I don’t know. It appears to be a symptom. Maybe due to a lack of exposure to new thinking. But then why can’t you just produce that new thinking? Why do you need to be exposed to it? So maybe it’s not so much new thinking that you need to be exposed to as it is fringe thinking. At the fringes of your own limits. You need one foot in ignorance and the other in awareness and as the momentum carries you forward, your breadth of awareness increases but so too does your breadth of ignorance because, suddenly, there are several new directions you could take toward the darkness. But it’s important to step toward the darkness and to do so while keeping one foot in the light. And you want to tread gently and with quick but not too quick pace forward. The inability to move forward, from this vantage point, begins to look less like the inability to move forward and more like pacing back and forth within the light. Staying comfortable. That’s what it means to be stuck. It’s not a lack of momentum. Its oscillating momentum. And its a symptom of fear. The fear of stepping into the darkness. Of what you might find. But the whole point of doing this is personal growth. So what you do is cast your light into the darkness and, with sufficient illumination and courage, you take the first step forward. And what do you find? Usually, even more to love. Even more beauty. Even more to be enriched by. But I should take care to note something here and remind the reader of Nietzsches’ admonition:

He who fights with monsters should take care that he does not become a monster. And he who gazes into the abyss may find that the abyss gazes also into him.

Nietzsche is saying that one should ensure to protect oneself from becoming the thing they’re trying to fight. And I need to say that the darkness I’ve been hitherto referring is darkness in the sense of ignorance and not necessarily evil. Darkness in the sense of evil is a whole other topic that I won’t get into here. The darkness of ignorance produces fear and fear produces the stuck. In the worst cases, it produces active intolerance and resistance to progress. It is wise to be cautious around lions. It is wise to, if you plan on being around lions, have an understanding about how they operate. You should not be surprised to have a heightened risk of being mauled if you situate yourself to be around lions. That being said you do not have to fear lions. Fear is counterproductive. It’s effective in urgent and immediately threatening situations because it stimulates the fight of flight response but, once you are away from danger, it is counterproductive. So, I’ve established that it’s fear that leads to the rut. What am I afraid of? In a separate post, I claimed to be afraid only of being abandoned by God. If I take my own reasoning to the end, I must conclude that the claim is false and recognize that I do fear something else. So what is it? Maybe not being smart enough. I may be afraid that, if I make attempts at venturing into the darkness and fail to make the light shine in it, I’ll have failed in some aspect of who I am. Maybe I define myself by how much I’ve come to understand and by how well I can construct an argument and do other smart things. That would be a bit sad. I don’t know if it’s true. I know that I used to spend some time dwelling on my intellectual capacities but it’s been a long time since I’ve let it bother me so it’s unlikely that that is the fear source I’m identifying. What else could it be? Fear of inadequacy? I think I’ve already addressed the intellectual aspect of this. But inadequate in another way or in anothers eyes? Maybe inadequate in the eyes of God? Yes but why would that lead to the rut? Hopelessness is a real condition of the soul and someone that knew with certainty that God had abandoned them would most probably be hopeless but would they be incapable of forward movement? Unwilling sure. But incapable? I doubt it. So it can’t be fear of inadequacy. What could it be? Ah. A fear of finding ones limit in this life. I don’t want to discover that. I don’t want to reach my full potential. I want to always be progressing toward greater things. If I stay in my comfort zone, there will almost always surely be more to uncover. More to discover. I just don’t want to find my limits.