Lovely limitation
how I failed to bond with a stranger
Hello! Yes it is Monday, not Saturday! Happy belated all-American day to those who celebrated it. My Saturday writing time was eaten by parenting logistics, and on Sunday I was tired, plus I’d previously obligated myself to cook curry for everyone. Eh!
This morning, I spontaneously decided to cut my morning walk and instead go to Aldi first thing, get in my workout, and then hopefully start writing earlier in the day to make up for lost time. So, I was waiting in line at Aldi, buying two containers of cottage cheese and a box of cereal. A couple of people were waiting, only two of the self-checkout registers were open instead of the usual three, and one was in use by a lady buying a bit more than the “15 max” items “allowed” at self-checkout. She was seemingly taking her time scanning each one, resolute, intent on doing this correctly. My brain started reciting the usual judgments. Really?? At this time of day? While everyone here is trying to get to work?! Etc. And on top of the audacity of taking her time scanning her stuff, when she was finally done manually entering her baked goods, you know what she did???
Paid in cash. On the self-checkout machine. With coins. A lot of them, because by the time I got to the other free machine, scanned my three items, and paid with my phone, she still wasn’t done inserting them into the coin slot.
The woman waiting behind me came up to the machine I’d been using before I could grab my receipt. I was about to get irritated at the pushiness when I glanced at her and saw she was discreetly rolling her eyes and grimacing at me. The autistic brain I was once diagnosed with didn’t immediately make the connection between her facial expression and the scene I’d just observed, so I’m not sure if I managed to give her an understanding wince of a smile back before skedaddling to make room for her.
Now, I’m a little short on time so I’m just going to say it: Limitation creates meaning. More precisely, the degree to which our limitations are accepted as what they are is directly proportional to the depth of meaning we will find within them.
The lady taking her time at checkout created a small limitation for those of us waiting for our turn. Wild guess — most of them (myself included) were annoyed. The woman behind me certainly was.
When I left, processing, I realized that this kind of annoyance, being bothered, bonding by complaining — this is the meaning one creates when one has not accepted the limitation at hand.
I also realized that I, of all people, had exactly no reason to be annoyed with this lady. Sure, my time is important too, even if it isn’t externally valued at €whatever per hour, etc — but the annoyance my mind created in this situation was not at all warranted. Plus, maybe it was this person’s first time using self-checkout! Maybe she made a bad judgment call thinking the ±16 different yogurts she was buying would be scanned in no time at all. Maybe the line was non-existent when she got to the register. In any case, she was not responsible for my annoyance. And the woman behind me, as annoyed as me, if not more? I have no idea what was going on with her, but if she’d had the capacity and flashed me a huge grin rushing to the machine I’d used before I was done, the spirit of the interaction, the meaning created by the limitation of the slow lady doing nothing wrong, on the contrary! would not have been unconsciously fabricated suffering, but pure connection. That said, I could have flashed her that grin nonetheless! But alas, I was confused.
All my weekend limitations taken together made it so my writing time was pushed to this morning, ridiculously enough also causing the very experience I found myself ready to extract precious, delicious, tantalizing meaning from.
Even better, I was about to politely and carefully postulate that — maybe?? could it be??? — “the meaning of life” can be reduced to meaningfully and joyfully existing within the limitations one is handed by life at any given time. That it then follows, obviously, that the less one is limited by life itself, the more challenging it becomes to see, much less experience the beautiful life juice of feeling like one’s existence makes sense. That as we get older, as we are less limited by life circumstances (being small or underage, school, lack of technology, institutions, in some cases, work) the easier it is to feel that one’s own life means... not much. As each limitation falls by the wayside, something else has to take its place so we don’t lose our minds in one sense or another.
But then I remembered that, uh, obviously I would think This Is It. In Human Design, Limitation (60) and Telling Stories (56) are my personality earth and sun, respectively. This is me. I think about this stuff all the time, every single little thing I experience is an exercise in meaning-extraction — and other people have other stuff. Everyone’s “meaning of life” is slightly different, depending on which polarity they were made at birth to forever find balance within.
So, okay then! Good talk, fun story. Until next time,
that was fun!
I loved this story a lot