Limits

It’s Sunday night, and I have been scrambling to do all the things I do on Sunday nights. Make sure backpacks are packed and homework finished and tucked into binders. Make the grocery list and meal plan. Fold, put away, and start a new load of laundry. Look at my week and figure out the logistics of work and school and play. And this thought keeps popping into my head “When do people find time to do things?”

And it seems like a silly and kind of embarrassing thing to admit, but I really do often wonder. When do people find the time to do all the things people do? To work, to go to the post office, to read, to garden, to go to church, to invest in relationships, to exercise, to be in book clubs, to supervise homework and play Candy Land, to cook dinner and clean the bathrooms. When (or really how) do people do all the things they do?

This fall I have had to turn down two opportunities I really wanted to be a part of, just because I couldn’t make it work in our schedule. Or rather, I knew that the cost of making it work in my schedule would be a price that my family and I would not be willing to pay.

I am learning that I have limits. A lot of them. And my husband and children do too. We are people who function best when we are not rushed, when we have time to be together, when we eat our food while sitting at the table. We need things like time and space and sleep and rest and play, or things get ugly.

It’s not just the kids. In fact, it may be me even more than the kids. When I feel too rushed, when there are too many demands in front of me, when my schedule is too full, it brings out the worst in me. I become inattentive, impatient, and task-oriented in the worst way. I am a less insightful and connected therapist and less engaged and present in all of my relationships. It’s not pretty.

I don’t actually love admitting these things, but I feel like I am not alone in this. And while there is lots to be said for creating space for all the things we need to be healthy, I think first we have to acknowledge that we have limits. That we simply cannot do all the things we want to in every season. That we will have to let some things go, simply because we are human beings with limited capacities. There are books and articles galore about how to do more, be more, make time for more. I own some of these books. But maybe we would be better served to say that sometimes it’s not about doing more or about squeezing more out of every minute. It’s about acknowledging that we simply cannot do all the things.

We can’t even do most of the things. We have limited physical, mental, and emotional energy. I think we know this at our core, but we fight it anyway. We feel like we SHOULD be able to do all the things that people do, and we feel tremendous pressure from living under that should. We look at people around us and imagine that they are doing all the things, and feel like we must be deficient because we can’t.

We are all limited human beings. We all have physical and emotional and mental limits, and we all need physical and emotional and mental and rest. If you see someone who appears to be juggling it all without dropping any balls there are a few possibilities. One is that you just don’t see the struggle, the things that don’t get done, the piles of dirty laundry left unfolded. Another possibilities is that they are in a season where everything is working, which is great, but I can tell you with complete certainty that it will not last forever. And another possibility is that they have different priorities than you. Perhaps their house is always clean, but they have almost never crack a book or run a mile or iron a shirt. Whatever it is that you see, you aren’t seeing the whole picture.

We are all human and we all have limits. Accepting that sounds so easy, but it is actually incredibly hard. It means acknowledging that we are not invincible, that we will fail and disappoint those we love. It’s a hard truth, but there is tremendous freedom in it.

Acknowledging our limitations creates the freedom for us to live mindfully and intentionally. It allows us to say good and necessary no’s so that we can have room to embrace the things that we can do. There are a lot of non-negotiables in our lives and in our schedules, but many of the things we think are essential may have more give than we think at first glance.

So next Sunday night, I am going to do the things I do on Sunday nights. I will check the backpacks, fold the laundry, and write the grocery list. And then I will stop, and curl up on my couch and read a book. Because I cannot do all the things that people can do, but I can do some things. I can do the things that are important to me. And that will be enough.

#laurenshaw #limits #boundaries #relationships #rest #counseling #arlingtoncounselingassociates #thearlingtoncenter #therapy