I wake up at 2:34 a.m., and my chest feels tight.  Glowing numbers from the display clock splay across the ceiling, and I turn over, determined to sleep, but there’s a smell in the air.  It’s that campfire smell, nice and woodsy, only it’s in my bedroom, and there’s nowhere I can go to get away from it because last night, dusk came at 4 p.m. 

Limitation.  How can it ever feel like a teacher, a friend?

I end up getting out of bed, traipsing into the TV room, where I’d set up the air purifier we’d dug out of storage, the one that works so-so.  With a book to soothe me, I forget the subtle sense of claustrophobia that my realization had engendered.  Our planet, the one I’ve always taken for granted, the one that I depend on, that sustains me, is burning.  Our home. 

It would be easy to slip into fear, to ride those rapids all the way down to despair.  The world we knew before Covid, before Trump, before climate change erupted as a reality, not just a threat – it’s gone.  But fear is not essential.  There are other lessons to be drawn, and I happen to know, from a lifetime of study, that fear is overrated.  We give it extraordinary power.  It shows up at our door, grinning from ear to ear, and we usher it in like a privileged guest, desperate to please.  After all, what can fear not do?  Its power is absolute, or so it seems.  Best to placate, to do its bidding, sign over the house, the kids, our souls.  There we stand, on the brink, then notice the cut-rate suit, the sheen of sweat upon the brow, and right then, in the blink of an eye, the universe turns upside down.  We recognize our visitor for what it is – a pauper, a salesman – and so we put away the check book and show it to the door. 

In a year of unprecedented limitation and loss, when history is being rewritten behind me and the future is up for grabs, I find myself marooned in the present moment.  There’s nothing to do but look around, take in the new view.  This is analog muscle.  Being where you are, finding connections, digging in.  And I can see that everything is more complex than it seems.  Even limitation, loss, apparent catastrophe, come bearing gifts. 

I’m told that lists are the thing in the blogosphere, sure to attract eyeballs.  So here it is, my list on the analog virtues of limitation.

1.  Limitation gives life shape.  My husband once knew a pair of brothers, trust fund kids destined for extraordinary wealth.  Strung out from freebasing, one of the brothers ran a stop sign, killing a mother and her two children.  The other was simply, desperately unhappy.  What is it to own the world?  To need strive for nothing?  How can we know what we are, what we’re capable of, how can we grow if we do not encounter obstacles, if we know no limitations?

2.  Limitation confers meaning, value.  This is related to the first premise, for value only arises in the relationship between things.  That’s why “value” in an analog creature.  Anyone who has lost a friendship, a loved one, a dream, knows that it is only when we lose something that the totality of its nature comes home to us.  We own it in a way we never can while we have it, knowing we are destined to lose it.  Loss delivers us to the substance of things. 

3.  Limitation provides resonance.  Resonance: “the quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating.”  Limitation is in the DNA of our existence.  Life is bounded by, and defined by, death.  Death gives life shape, meaning, and in a very real way makes us human.  Without death, there is no existence.  And when we encounter death in all its lesser guises, we feel the resonance of having our own natures reflected back upon us.  If we allow it to be, limitation can be reassuring, affirming our essential nature.  Just like swaddling a baby.

4.  Limitation forces change, growth, even transformation.  This is alchemy.  Physics.  Diamonds are merely lumps of coal under pressure.  And without limitations, we find ourselves adrift.  My kids ask, “when are we going back to school?”  The movie star enters rehab, floundering in a sea of yes-men and starter mansions, too much of a good thing.  We covet diamonds, mistaking the product for the power.  Start by being coal.  Embrace the forces that shape you, that cause you to abandon old, limiting beliefs, that reveal you as something new, brilliant, durable.

5.  Limitation is essential to creation.  Only when the status quo breaks down may new forms emerge.  Only when the caterpillar dies to the world is the butterfly born.  You can’t have it both ways.  Two forms cannot exist concurrently in the same space.  And the aspect of limitation that is death, breakdown, decay, makes possible birth, breakthrough, new life. 

6.  Limitation heals.  The world is getting smaller, resources scarcer, full of people, problems, noise.  Information crowds our inner space.  The pressure builds.  And then, something snaps.  A knee stays too long on a black man’s neck, a media mogul goes down after decades of harassment, assault, rape, and suddenly, it’s not good enough.  Limitation forces poisons out into the open, exposes injustices, lances wounds.  Limitation makes healing possible. 

7.  Limitation is reality.  Here’s my nutshell summation – “I used to be different, but now I’m the same.”  It is always more satisfying to be what you are than to deny it, no matter how alluring the fantasy you’re chasing.  And what we are is limited.  Fixed in physicality, in time, in a world of limited resources, defined by frailty, vulnerability and ultimately death.  All this is what makes us beautiful.  Consider The Matrix.  There is a reason this movie became an instant classic.  We know this story, in the deepest possible way.  “The red pill and the blue pill” is now a meme, Wikipedia tells me, “representing a choice between taking either a ‘red pill’ that reveals an unpleasant truth, or taking a ‘blue pill’ to remain in blissful ignorance.”  And so, we turn towards the challenges of our new century, we embrace our wholeness, just as we are. 

There it is, the analog beauty of loss and limitation.  As I look out my window at the yellow sky, the jagged tips of the firs, blurred by smoke, I consider other horizons.  2020: fulcrum, watershed, full of death, full of life.  What is there to do but be, here, now, again and again and again?