• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

Thought for the Day You have to understand your limitations....

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.

Paul Whybrow

Full Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2015
Location
Cornwall, UK
LitBits
0
You have to understand your limitations. It's your limitations that make you the most wonderful disaster you probably are.

Nick Cave

iu
 
We'd be identikit amorphous blobs otherwise. Like we used to be once upon a time before we chose cell diversification as the way to go, trading our immortality for limits, including loss of longevity, without which there can be no unique identity
Indeed, but a result of that is that all limitations and abilities are comparative. You could think of it as a limitation that you can only leap over tall buildings.
 
Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Limitations are always comparative, yes, yes, of course. except for Death which is both the ultimate limitation, and the ultimate liberation of limitation at the same time.

There are personal limitations and circumstantial limitations, which includes socio-economic factors. I lost the ability to walk when my children were still small. It was one stinking practical as well as intellectually shocking and frightening experience of severe encroaching limitation. I have damaged hands now. It's a limitation every minute of my waking day, I can type, but not peel an apple. I can still, but only barely plait my own hair, just about.

I had to stop work, doing what I was doing. But I felt driven to find new things I could do, and without that discomfort of limitation, I might never have felt sufficiently driven, and that was how I found my true metier. A limitation is a problem, it is a spur, and that's not only how, but often why humanity learns new things. Thinking of Keats for example, Or Robert Louis Stephenson, or Emily Dickinson, or James Baldwin. It just goes on and on.

Invention arises from problem solving, twas ever so, or if we had everything we needed, we'd be lotus eaters. Writers and artists, but anyone at all, it is that very sense of limitation that has been a pressure cooker.

Like that old song, freedom is another word for nothing left to lose. Space enough is room to breathe, but too much is a vacuum. Lack of limitation = goo.
 
Last edited:

Further Articles from the Author Platform

Latest Articles By Litopians

  • Hat Thieves Beware
    Summer 2017… schools and nurseries were closed for the holidays, and the grandkids were kicking th ...
  • Writer Beware
    I think AI is inundating my email inbox with author scams. Apparently AI is somehow gathering data o ...
  • Bad advice
    I’ve been on X again. I know, I know. I need to stop, but something keeps drawing me back. Maybe i ...
  • Farty Towels?
    I’ve always found it strange that often the first thing guests ask me, when I check them in is, ...
  • Consequential Detritus
    Mars 20,025 Xenoarchaeological Survey Team Epsilon for Galactic Central Command Captain Mandible? Ye ...
  • The Writer’s House
    Bristol is one of my favourite cities. I visit here a few times a year, and the second part of my no ...
  • The Song of Bert and Harry: The Name of that Pub
    “We went for a pub meal last night,” Bert suddenly announced. “Nice place, all done out with ...
What Goes Around
Comes Around!
Back
Top