how much/how many?

for the last six or eight months, i’ve carried around a quote in the signature of my emails:

“once you can see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”

growing up, it’s easy to believe that there is a limit to understanding; that, when you finally achieve adulthood, you will have experienced all things and will make educated, verifiably correct decisions accordingly.  and then you have that wondeful, despair-inducing realization that the set of things is actually unfathomably, inexperienceably large.  throw in a ferrari or a new wife and this is also called a midlife crisis.

our boundaries are in place to try to shield us from this uncomfortable realization.  they provide the rules, structures, and limits to our worlds, and in doing so help us to differentiate between what we believe to be comparably easy and what we believe to be comparably hard.  in truth, the only difference between the easy and the hard is psychological.  we understand this implicitly, but somehow remain so easily shocked when olympians like usain bolt and michael phelps shatter our notion of what is possible.

the impact of travel is similarly monumental.  deep, honest immersion in another society makes us aware of the unspoken limitations of our own.  hiding behind the western rhetoric about the pursuit of happiness is the fear that we’re not really happy, and that all this work might not actually be worth the promised reward of Truth that keeps elusively escaping us.  we chase a utopian ideal, consistently ignoring what we know to be true.  and we live within our walls, rarely summoning the strength to peep over and see what might be hidden just outside.

it’s both unfair and insulting to suggest that the pastoral - and often poverty-stricken - life in a place like India inspires a nobility that is preferable to our world of Plasma and LCD.  but it’s similarly one-dimensional to believe that the nature of that life is so much worse.  hidden behind the marble countertops over here is a feeling of sadness that overwhelmed my return almost as oppressively as the sweltering humidity that marked my departure.  this place resonates with the drone of perfection that permeates every family photo and each carefully selected keffiyah.  that drive for perfection, in its intensity of pain, seems to challenge the authentic realities of a totally separate world overcome with disease and poverty.  the biggest affliction affecting the world, i’ve come to believe, is our own attachment to our idea of the importance of our Selves, and the very sad irony is that we’re too self-involved to see it, much less stop the rate at which we’re helping the disease of Self-Importance propagate around the planet.

i’m not smart enough to understand how we got ourselves into this pickle or how to get ourselves out.  but i do think it’s a conversation that’s worth having together, which is why i’m always trying to push you to see past your own limits.  as i keep learning, the most difficult part in reconfiguring your boundaries is finding your new ones.