The Slow Way Newsletter: Limits and the Gift of Spaciousness
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
What Will You Do With Your Limits?
Ten years ago Chris and I moved from San Francisco to Austin, Texas with a 3-year-old and a 5-month-old. Nine years ago, at the end of September, we moved back to San Francisco.
During that one year in Austin we attended a church we loved. I was part of a writer’s group, volunteered in my son’s preschool co-op, led a college girls bible study once a week, wrote a successful blog about motherhood and faith, wrote a proposal for a book and landed an agent, dealt with my three-year-old’s nightly and angry wake ups, spat out several clever and meaningful tweets a day to my burgeoning following, and last but not least, breastfed a baby. That year I got so sick that I fainted in the shower. I had my first migraine. I cried often, overwhelmed by my lack of sleep and the intensity of raising little kids. I was 32 years old.
I just had this realization yesterday that It’s been ten years since we moved away from Austin. That I’m 42, and that the story I wrote in the one and only book I’ve published is the story of that woman, someone whose energy and relentless pursuit of accomplishment and hard work feels like a distant story in my life, a way of living that I left long ago. I feel like an old woman looking back at her childhood, sighing. Well, isn’t that something?
When I realized it’s been ten years, I also realized it’s been one year since we moved to New Jersey. This year has looked nothing like that year in Austin. No writing group, no bible study of 18-year-old girls. Instead of one migraine I’ve probably had a hundred. My thirteen-year-old son sleeps through the night and he hugs me in my room and walks by himself to his bed at night. I am working on a proposal, and that same agent would have liked it a looooong time ago. I also haven’t found a church. Of course, these are Covid times, and around here the option *going* to church didn’t even really become an option until four months ago. But still, here we are, a year into a new town where I haven’t served anyone, where I haven’t accomplished much if any career goals, and where I’ve gardened, a lot.
Some might call this aging. Losing the energy of our youth. I think my three kids sucked that energy straight dry from my breastmilk. (I haven’t even mentioned that Ace came around in these ten years between!) But for me this has been more than aging. It’s been spiritual work. It’s been learning to believe that I am more than what I do, that I don’t have to accomplish to be worthy of love, that being gentle with the time allotted to my life is not waste, it’s wisdom.
There’s a reason I cried in the bathroom when the kids were screaming for me in those days. There’s a reason my blog was packed full of moments when I was overwhelmed by my life and my children, praying for God to part the waters of my mind so I could give them grace and time and the best parts of myself. My exhaustion was a choice I was making for myself. I was so busy proving to myself that I could raise kids and succeed as a writer and be a good neighbor and minister to young women, that I refused to allow myself the sleep I needed.
Ashley Hales begins her new book A Spacious Life, asking her readers to “pay careful attention to [our] limits.” This is the kind of wisdom I had to learn in the bathroom of our house in Austin, crouched in a ball, my children crying on the other side of the door. There are limits, and wisdom is found not only in the acceptance of those limits, but in their embrace. In the wonder of acknowledging that actually, those limits come from God.
Ashley writes, “As God’s creatures . . . we are all limited by our bodies, by our personalities, by our place, by our circles of relation, and by those for whom we are responsible. We are limited in our power and authority and by particular seasons of work, health, and faith. We are limited in our time, our attention, and our calling. Our God-given limits are the doorway to a more spacious life.”
Leeana Tankersly (whose book Hope Anyway ) also talks about the reality that once you make and accept space in your life, it can disorienting and terrifying. “The space is not super comfortable because it’s new and it’s . . . well . . . empty. But it’s there, and you can feel it. And something in you sees it for what it is. An opportunity.”
That’s the thing about limits, and about making space in your life. It’s terrifying. After all, what do I have to show for the space that’s been made for me by embracing my own limits? It’s been seven years since my book was published. My Twitter game is wholly unimpressive. And there’s no list of authors or writers where I’m sitting snuggly in a space of success or power.
But I don’t cry in the bathroom anymore, you guys. And I sing while I chop vegetables. I read for pleasure. I clip flowers from my garden and put them in vases. I don’t make snacks for my littlest child while scratching out a clever comment for the internet. Any attempts at interneting usually happen less frequently in another place in the house, alone. And that’s how I’ve not succeeded. And also how I’ve chosen freedom from the efficiency machine.
It’s how I’ve learned to embrace my limitations as gifts from God.
Here’s the truth: As I write this, my chest tightens. I'm not fully free from my 32-year-old self. From time to time I cry about my career, what I had dreamed it would be by now and what is actually reality. On unhealthy days I can rage at myself that I can’t manage to give the world more cleverness on Twitter, that I lost the readership I once I had, that I’m still trying to find healthy patterns of writing and producing. But my Wisdom knows the truth, down deeper under the chest-tightening, in my gut. I know who I want to be, what my limits are, what I did to myself in those years when the best parts of me were given to the internet instead of to the babies beside me. And I’m still learning the way forward, where I hold space for what it is, terrifying in it’s wide-openness, full of possibility.
In six days my youngest will go to school. And for the first time, he will be away from me for more than four hours a day. I will be child free during the day for the first time since 2008. What will I do with the wisdom I've gained in these thirteen years? What will I create from my own wholeness?
And what about you: The question isn't what will you do with your time, it's what will you do with your limits?
a slow practice
What are your limits? Let's take Ashley's words and reflect on them more deeply:
"...we are all limited by our bodies, by our personalities, by our places, by our circles of relation, and by those for whom we are responsible. We are limited in our power and authority and by particular seasons of work, health, and faith. We are limited in our time, our attention and our calling. Our God-given limits are the doorway into a more spacious life" (From A Spacious Life, Chapter 1).
Let's give ourselves some time to reflect on each aspect of our lives that Ashely lists. Let yourself consider your limits in each of these parts of your life. Write each word or phrase in your journal and write your limits beside each word.
Body
Personality
Place
Circles of relationships
Those for whom we're responsible
Power
Authority
This particular season of work
Health
Faith
Time
Attention
Calling
What are your dreams and desires for the ways you spend your time? And what might God want you to learn about your own limits?
Pray for wisdom and clarity. Pray for space and the courage to see your limits as gifts, and time as a friend.