Living Is Limitation

October 6, 1985
Lakeland

October 27, 1985
Port Charlotte

The late Robert Day created memorable cartoons for the NEW YORKER. One rather famous cartoon he created launches our subject today. “A young father, kneeling on the muddy shoulder of a busy highway, is attempting to change a flat tire in a driving rainstorm. From inside the car, his two children stare at him in disbelief, ‘Don’t you understand?’ he asks them. ‘This is life, this is what is happening. We can’t switch to another channel.’” That observation represents both bad news and good news.

Living is limitation. We were born of particular parents at an unchangeable day and year. The length of our lives may be limited by the genes we inherit, the accidents that happen to us, and the social and environmental conditions which mould our lives. Like most of you, I have thought sadly about the recent disastrous earthquake in Mexico City. Almost 5,000 known dead, and at least 50,000 homeless because the earth shook, and buildings shattered because a great subterranean force killed and destroyed, causing suffering of which we can be only partially aware. We saw the news-clips, heard the commentators, but the immediacy of the pain, grief, and suffering was not ours to grasp fully. We were not there.

Living was limitation for the thousands of casualties because any understanding of the social, economic, political conditions of our neighbor country made it, if not impossible, at least highly unlikely for those who suffered the disaster to be anywhere else. Where in the world would one live and have complete security from earthquake, hurricane, flood, volcanic eruption, drought, and storm? In our own neighborhoods, the citrus growers and marketers have been limited by freezes, fruit flies, and canker. These disasters have happened, and no one can switch the past to another channel.

Beyond the inevitable natural catastrophes, we live with ... as individuals with limitations. This must be cartoon scripture day. “Small Society” - (9/22 Yates) – [a worried man, in a series of panels, notes,

“Nothing but problems in this world
There’s always something to worry about
If it’s not money or health
Or a job or the kids
Or the big bomb or politicians
Or pollution or inflation
Or energy or crime
Or a million and one other things -
There’s no end to it -
Hoo-Boy! The trouble with life is you never get a day off - ”]

We were born, and each succeeding hour we get older. We have a physical inheritance that may be strong or weak. We are vulnerable to various blows and misfortunes. How nice it would be if scientific medicine and technology had already found causes and cures for Alzheimer’s disease, AIDS, and cancers as Jonas Salk found the way to prevent polio. We live with the limitation of vulnerability to illnesses of body and mind not yet curable.

Bruce Southworth, minister of Community Church, New York City, tells a story which needs no additional commentary:

“There is a story, a true story I imagine, about a little boy who was helping his father serve the guests at the dinner table. He brought in a piece of pie. He set it in front of his mother who passed it on to one of the visitors. He returned to the kitchen and came back with another piece of pie which he placed again in front of his mother, who again passed it on to one of the visitors. After several such trips the little boy said, “It’s no use, Mom – they don’t get any bigger!”

We get older, and as an older one, I know that after a certain point, our powers wane. As Tennyson wrote in ULYSSES,

“Though much is taken,
much abides; and though
we are not now that strength
which in the old says moved
earth and heaven;
that which we are, we are....”

One Betsy Freiburger in the “Pepper and Salt” column of the Wall Street Journal had a couplet:

“Middle age shows a definitive sign
When one burns the midnight oil
at nine.”

Many times, however, the limitations of age are more in another person’s eyes than our own perceptions. Again, I was stimulated by another “Small Society” cartoon strip:

[Two old men meeting in a park.
Man 1: Nice day -
Man 2: Couldn’t be better -

Man 1: Do you come here often?
Man 2: Every day -

Man 2: Depending on the weather, of course. When it rains, I go to the library -

Man 2: I’m retired -

Man 1: I’m retired too -
Man 2: That’s nice -

Man 2: Who did YOU used to be?]

Living is limitation, particularly when we are prematurely mustered out of the march of time by the insensitive or uninformed.

The foregoing has been the bad news. But there’s good news, too. Living is limitation, but the limitation may be imagined or imposed rather than true and determining.

In dealing with life’s limitations, many times we cringe inwardly when we look back on the foolish, naïve, wrong, or unkind experiences we have inflicted on ourselves and others. We blame ourselves or alibi ourselves.

But one cannot win in the blame game or find a solution in alibis. Time may be relative in astro-physics, but in human experience it is absolute. If we have learned from our mistakes of omission or commission, great, but one cannot be transported back to a former time except in fantasy or fiction. [CJW note: seeking blame and alibi are formidable barriers to learning from experience.] ... the wise Moslem humanist Omar Khayyam wrote:

“The moving finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

Next, there is a recognition about limitations that is of central importance – do not assume that what others perceive your limits to be are truly the boundaries of your capabilities.

The parable of the talents has interpretations beyond numbering. ...I reject the theology, particularly about the fearful one who hid his talents under the mattress and was therefore called worthless and cast out into darkness. That is a cruel doctrine, indeed. If Jesus told this parable and meant it, he was hardly the loving, gentle Jesus who in another part of the gospel told persons they should forgive seventy times seven. The insights I find in this parable are out of context. More modern translations use thousand dollars for talent. Five talents – five thousand dollars, and so on. But I think of talents as our capacities, our abilities, the parable lesson being that many of us do not use all of our talents.

I remember years ago listening to a prominent Christian churchman restate the parable with a different twist. Twisting the scriptures is an ancient and modern preaching and literary device, sometimes to good effect.

Anyway, this Christian bishop told a revised parable of the talents. In his version the Lord gave five talents to a servant who really was a two talent person. The servant worked mightily and accumulated four talents more. When this servant made his accounting, he was crushed that he had not achieved [the] five talents goal and was quite miserable and ashamed.

The master looked at him and smiled, “You never were a five talent man; you were two talents, and by your extra effort you have achieved four. Thou good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of the Lord.”

[CJW note: Also I reject the economic scheme that what underachievers have is given to overachievers.]

As I said, I do not respond to the theology, but as a parable of human potential, I find it instructive, even inspirational. We may be selling our talents short when [we] fail to stretch, to make extra efforts in events of importance.

There is some verse that capsules the insight “Advice for My Daughter” - it applies equally to sons, fathers, and mothers, too.

Advice For My Daughter

“BE GOOD and let who will be clever,”
The poet urged, but daughter, never
Act upon what Victorians said:
Their pretty, curtseying world is dead.

Be clever, child! Loving, kind -
A Christian sort, but never blind
To all the miseries that hit
The merely good for want of wit.

“Be hard, get yours,” say men of late,
“The Golden Rule is out of date.”
And so they scheme, live subtle lies,
While simple joy within them dies.

Be hard – but on yourself alone,
In making certain skills your own;
Keep reaching for your special star,
And you’ll “get yours” - in what you are.

Alan Jenkins, from The Christian Century

One thing more, in the dangerous world in which we live, beware of limitations imposed by others, even when they are called “authorities.” It would be sad [CJW note: and fatal] if we accepted the inevitability of nuclear war, or a planet fully poisoned by pollution, or believed it impossible to eliminate increasing poverty and growing crime. Such fatalistic moods grasp me from time to time and I need the hope that lightens despair.

I clipped the ad of a large corporation, which is instructive, amusing, and a lighted candle for moments of gloom. The ad is entitled “The future isn’t what it used to be.” [editor’s note: the ad has pictures of and quotes from famous people.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” - Charles H. Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” - Harry M. Warner, Warner Brothers Pictures, c. 1927

“Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.” - Grover Cleveland, 1905

“There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.” - Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923

“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.” - Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895

“Ruth made a big mistake when he gave up pitching.” - Tris Speaker, 1921

There is a tendency in individuals and societies to discourage doing anything the first time. This hesitancy or opposition limits opportunities. Authentic limitations are one thing; imposed limitations are quite another, and must be tested by innovation, invention, and courage, not only in the physical sciences but also in the more difficult areas of war and peace, political economies, and world-wide social problems.

Baseball managers are noted for their amusing misuse of expressions. Yogi Berra is famous for his sayings. For example, when asked, “Yogi, have you made up your mind yet?” Yogi responded, “Not that I know of.”

Danny Ozark, former manager, was asked about a rookie, “Danny, what about your outfielder, Mike Anderson?” Ozark replied, “His limitations are limitless.” I don’t know what Ozark was attempting to say, but living is limitation.

To summarize, living is limitation. Time, place, circumstance, inheritance [all] present limits for every one of us. We are what we are. Nevertheless, living is more fulfilling when we stay out of the games of blame and alibi. Our self grows when we assume that perception of our limits and that the measurements society defines as limits has usually been demonstrated, eventually, to be wrong.

Or as a great educator of another generation, William Heard Kilpatrick (PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, p. 160), put before us, “Life is to be counted worth living on its own terms, that properly we may, and even should, seek to express and enjoy life as a positive good. A second characteristic is the belief that the quality of life can be improved by proper study and effort, and third, that the good life of each individual is inseparably bound up with a like, but not identical, good life for all others.”

Indomitable old Claude Pepper summed up all I have been trying to say for the last 20 minutes:

“Life is like riding a bicycle. You don’t fall off unless you stop pedaling.” (READER’S DIGEST)