Human limits or limitations?
That’s the prompt I gave to my writers in salon today–Human limits or you can call them human limitations.
Salon works like this–For 60 minutes, they write what comes to them when they repeat the words ‘human limits’ to themselves.
What showed up today included ideas on our inner world of creativity and how to not only sustain it, but help it grow, written by a psychotherapist. And we learned that financial details are best kept in software like QuickBooks and data entered by professional bookkeepers because often, business owners find that sort of work dull and tedious.
It’s simply not a good use of our time, according to an experienced business consultant. We learned in the course of an hour that our outer world may have limits, but our inner world is limitless when we allow it to be. And our personal limits around our business does not have to limit us in any way when we call on professionals for help.
This prompt, human limits, also came to me early this morning as a reflection of a year that has stretched us thin. A pandemic that brought not just disease, but despair to many of us. To economics that have caused a great deal of struggle for families. To worry about the political climate, by both the right and the left.
And our actual climate, which has gotten ignored during all of this year’s political bickering. The prompt is an invitation to examine human limits—how and where do they show up? How big are our limitations in terms of what we can withstand? I think they’re huge.
But most people have no idea how strong and courageous they are in the midst of their perceived limits. They show me, though, through their writing. Beautiful, deep, resonating prose written as memoir. As a series of essays or short stories. As chapters of a nonfiction book.
The writers show up and respond to a prompt. It’s like magic, but really, it’s just writers tossing aside their thoughts about human limits and writing a story instead. What are your human limits?