The Blessing of a Limited Life
The first verse of our national anthem closes with the words, “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” The high note that many stretch to reach when they hold out the word “free” is a reminder of both the significance of the concept of freedom in our culture and the challenge of limits.
We know that “freedom isn’t free.” There are enough bumper stickers and patriotic t-shirts floating around to remind us that the civil freedoms we experience come at a steep cost in human suffering.
But we sometimes forget that freedom isn’t simply the absence of limits. Freedom requires the absence of some limits, but, paradoxically, true freedom requires the presence of others.
The classic example is that a fish (excepting lungfish, thanks) isn’t actually free when it is on the land. A shark may escape the confines of the ocean by swimming up on shore. But that escape from limits is a death sentence; unless it gets returned to the water, the shark will die.
“Sunlit Wall Under a Tree,” attributed to John Singer Sargent. Public Domain: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.129320.html
Humans, of course, have the ability to technologically adapt to overcome our limits. We built submarines so we can live underwater. We invented spacesuits so that we can have people wandering out in the emptiness beyond our atmosphere. We build and maintain golf courses in the Arizona desert.
Overcoming some limits is good. We push back on the limits of the human body to heal by inventing some prescription medicines that augment the body’s natural abilities. I’m thankful for antibiotics and cochlear implants.
But the goodness of overcoming limits in some areas sometimes leads us to believe that overcoming limits in all areas is good. Ashley Hales’s book, A Spacious Life: Trading Hustle and Hurry for the Goodness of Limits, is a reminder that isn’t always so.
The Goodness of Limits
Parables of sharks on land are helpful illustrations of the goodness of limits. But more disruptive and imaginative thinkers soon begin to imagine those sharks in environmentally controlled suits or even with laser beams.
Hales begins her book with more benign examples. She compares the feeling of open freedom experienced by a young married couple living abroad with the constraints entailed in raising children.
People without children are notoriously confident in their ability to better navigate child-rearing in a way that doesn’t disrupt the social patterns of life. The truth is that tiny people take a lot of tending and they don’t fit well into the empty spaces of our lives. Children are a gift from God; yet they place significant limits on the couples that bring them into the world.
Those limits are good things. Throughout the book, Hales recounts the feelings of loss of losing a child due to miscarriage. She explains the joys of helping the little ones—now older—grow and learn and become people who are aware of their limits. None of those positives would have been possible without she and her husband accepting the necessary limitations of parenthood.
Every choice to do something is a choice to say no to something else. Our days are numbered, our energy is not boundless, our financial resources constrained.
The Pain of Limitless Living
Early in the book, Hales writes:
“Our freedom narrative in the West––choosing your own destiny according to your own sense of autonomous freedom––is leaving at sea in endless choice. We are lonely, exhausted, and unsure what success or joy even looks like anymore.” (5)
The paralysis of standing in the store choosing between hundreds of types of toothpaste is, of course, the perfect and now cliché example. But it’s true.
As she notes in Chapter 11,
“We think guardrails restrict our freedom. When freedom is freedom from constraints, we live in a world we control––yet we find ourselves caged by the things we chase.
Good guardrails protect us from falling off the side of the cliff and also allow us space to play, explore, and even fall, knowing we are secure. Creativity flourishes amid constraints.” (112–13)
Guardrails keep us on the pathway. They prevent us from falling off the cliff. They give us comfort that, though the paneling on our car may be damaged, if we slip on the icy road, yet we will not die.
A mountain road without those guardrails leaves us with a much greater fear. And that fear brings with it a greater pain. We experience that pain whether or not the worst happens, because we know there is a much higher likelihood that it will.
The Freedom of Limits
A Spacious Life is a reminder that God has given us limits. Some are natural limits. Some are spiritual. We will do well when we seek to color within the lines he has given us.
Each of the thirteen chapters offers a meditation on a biblical passage that highlights the God-given limitedness of the human being. With delicate, often poignant prose, Hales invites readers into a deeper experience of God in a life with smaller boundaries than advertisers try to sell us. She offers a vision of the beauty of simplicity and patience.
This is the sort of book that could be digested alone, over time. Perhaps a chapter a day would be a good pace, or maybe even a chapter a week. It could also be used for a small group study, especially with parents of little children who are trying to balance the feeling of losing (or pausing) their career with the absolute dependence of a baby or toddler.
There are examples within the book that tend to be directed toward women, but the book should not be limited to that audience. There are analogous feelings of limitedness that come to the father and husband who has to lay down his preferences (and often, we hope, his hobbies) for the well-being of his family.
This short book is a useful tool for our weary age. It is a reminder that our value before God is not limited to our hustle or the number of tasks we complete. So, instead of pursuing a life of endless activity, we should build a life of greater dependence and enjoyment of God.
The way we talk about humans also has moral implications, which are more significant than how we treat our pets. In his 2011 book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith explores how language changes culture and leads to the justification of extreme violence against others, especially when they become perceived as less than human.