Story Our Limit

Story Our Limit

Personal Choice

September 18, 2016

We live in a world of limits and it is within these limits that we are free to move about. Paradoxically, without limit we have no freedom. Paul says that the law of liberty of life has set us free. How can a law, which by its very nature binds, set us free? Because freedom is always freedom in something. Without the “something” freedom ceases to exist. Our problem is that we have been trained to only look inward for our truth and authority. We have all become addicted to our own way of thinking and until we break out of this egotistical cycle we will never be able to love anything other that ourselves. Ironically, what modern man wants - complete autonomy - is the very death of freedom. In becoming a law to yourself you have bound yourself to a story smaller than that of a two year old infant. By making yourself the ultimate limit, you rob yourself of all freedom outside yourself. Thus, in looking only to the self, the individual undermines his own egotistical objective. For what he wants - complete freedom - is an illusion. Freedom, by definition, must emerge within a limit. To be free from everything is to be unable to do anything. Therefore, the man who truly wants freedom will not deny all limits but search for the largest limit; the biggest story in which he can move about. 

In story we live and move and have our being. To try and escape story one must create another story, only to find himself back where he began in story. Story is the fundamental way in which humans process and communicate their lives. We first encounter life through our own small stories with ourselves as the protagonist. Our conscience filters everything that happens to us in relation to ourselves. The human mind organizes everything through story, taking the sum total of fragmented experiences that make up the totality of one’s life and forming a coherent plot that draws all the stings together into a meaningful tapestry. We can easily forgive, and perhaps applaud, a child when he makes himself the center of attention. The tragedy is that when the child becomes a forty year old man and has never grown out of his own small story. Our problem is not that we begin at the center but that we never break out of the center. The world is full of adolescent adults running around in madness, all living under the delusion of being life’s protagonist.