Going Beyond the Limits

“Go beyond the limits” my history teacher said to the class. He repeated it, just in case the phrase hadn’t fully sunk in. “Go beyond the limits.”

What did he mean to go beyond the limits? Clearly we were supposed to take our assignment and bump it up a notch, raise the bar if you will, but how? How were we supposed to do that?

“Can you give an example?” I asked, looking for any sort of structure.

He couldn’t. Perhaps he didn’t want to. He simply told us to not settle for what we think is adequate. If people had settled for what was adequate civilization never would have advanced. “After all,” he said, “Nobody makes an impression being adequate. Great writers are not adequate; hence the title Great. Leaders aren’t adequate, they’re motivational and inspiring. Who is inspired by adequacy?”

Admittedly, adequacy had inspired me for many, many years and I had settled for plenty of things. I didn’t like to risk going beyond the limits because they were unknown. What a ridiculous notion to be afraid of the unknown! It’s like being afraid of nothing, or being afraid of what might happen if we do this, or if we don’t. I wondered, what would happen if I went beyond the limits of the assignment? What would happen if I didn’t?

Go beyond the limits. Was I supposed to add a visual? A graph? Use six resources instead of five? Maybe instead of an essay I could create a documentary. Film my thesis, my research, my report and my conclusions. Maybe this was way off the mark, out of bounds if you will. I began to wonder then, what’s the difference between going beyond the limits and going out of bounds? Don’t they both exceed the expected? Perhaps the difference lay in appropriateness, and going out of bonds is inappropriate.

I felt myself growing increasingly frustrated. Why are we always expected to go beyond the limits? Why can’t people be satisfied with adequacy? Damn Maslow and his hierarchy of needs! What’s so hot about self-actualization anyway? Animals meet their basic needs and they are perfectly content where they are. Sure, an awareness of one’s own self and accomplishments separates us from the animals, but why the need to pursue greater things to begin with? I concluded this nonsense of going beyond the limits must have begun with cavemen, the same ones who discovered fire, invented the wheel, and created arrowheads.

“I think, therefore, I am.” This philosophy wasn’t vocalized until 1637 when René Descartes wrote “Discourse on Method”, but did it exist even though it was not spoken? Can things only be when they think? Animals don’t think, at least not on the same level of cognition as humans do. And rocks certainly don’t think, yet they are. They exist. They exist and they are perfectly adequate. A rock does not say to itself: “I think I will become a boulder. I think I shall become gold.” No, no. The rock remains stagnant and happy. At least as happy as a rock can get. Perhaps it gathers moss, but nonetheless, it is a rock. Unthinking, adequate, and perfectly acceptable. No one ever expects more of it.

Perhaps one day a caveman grabbed a rock and wanted to make something of it. From that rock he created an arrowhead. The next day the caveman grabs another rock to make another arrowhead. This time the rock shatters, quite unsuitable for any sort of piercing weapon. The caveman doesn’t say to the rock: “You have let me down.” He accepts the fact that the rock broke. After all, it’s what rocks do. Rocks break.

Rocks break and people settle. That’s why those groups of people who founded the west were called “settlers”. They traveled across the ocean in boats for months, facing famine, disease, and death. They arrived on the east coast of what is now the United States of America and kept going. They journeyed across the flatlands of Kansas, over the Rocky Mountains of the continental divide. and finally someone said, “Whoa, fellas, enough is enough! We can’t go on forever. Here is adequate. Here we will settle.”

If we always strive to go beyond the limits, where does it end? When is it enough? Is going beyond the limits an adequate staple or should one go beyond the limits of that just a bit more? Yes, I raised the bar for my essay, but in retrospect I suppose it should have been higher. I decided to write about how our history has been one example after another of a person, a civilization that went beyond the limits. We were required to write a ten-page essay; I wrote fifteen. We were required to have five resources; I gathered eight. We were required to provide a visual; I made a poster, and provided charts and artifacts. I even baked cookies, not that it has anything to do with the project, but whatever. I went beyond the limits. In my essay I discussed that rock. That elusive, perfectly adequate rock. How it never became anything and just stayed a rock, but that’s ok because the world needs rocks.

Even though I went beyond the limits, I got a B-.
An adequate grade.
What is up with that?