Martin Shaw - “…make peace with limit”
When I think about my childhood, there were limits on most things…and that was ok. There were limits on how many times we left the farm to go to ‘town’ (once a fortnight, maybe), how often we went to ‘the city’ (the ‘city’ being New Orleans, a 1.5hr drive; once every other month or less - depending on how often my grandmother needed to go to the specialist), how often we ate out (maybe once or twice a year), how often we visited friends and family (only on holidays), but church was every Sunday (because interacting with a higher power is more important than the other outings listed and it was just up the road).
These were activities I did with my grandmother; my grandfather very rarely left the farm…only to go to the ‘seed and feed’, the auction to sell cattle and chickens and to visit his fiend ‘up the road’ who had a dairy (we used to help him hook up all the cows for milking in exchange for fresh milk - so there were limits on fresh milk, too).
There were also limits on hot water - I used to only have a bath once or twice a week, on the same night we ran the dishwasher (this belonged to my grandmother as my grandfather was completely opposed to it) and did whatever else required hot water. This is because we didn’t keep the hot water service on all the time.
There were limits on electricity - Louisiana is hot in Summer, so we would come inside in the middle of the day to cool down, my grandmother would make a strawberry milkshake for everyone (fresh milk from ‘up the road’, a raw egg, fresh strawberries and homemade ice cream) and we would play a card game or two (and be very still). We only put the radio on when we left the house, I guess to make people think we were home (I’m not sure about this as we lived in the middle of NOWHERE, I can’t imagine it was really an issue). We only turned on the TV for The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas on a Friday night or for my grandfather to watch college football (not professional, though). We only had one light on at night - in the kitchen as it was central.
We borrowed books from the library, we made paper dolls, I sorted buttons under the table where my grandmother worked (she was an interior decorator, she owned her business and worked from home - quite progressive she was).
We ate the animals we raised - cattle, ducks, turkeys, guine fowl, chickens, pigs, geese; and the produce we grew - sweet potatoes, squash, tomatoes, blueberries, grapes, blackberries, watermelon, corn, mustard greens, onions, potaoes, herbs. We rarely ate seafood that didn’t come from our pond, mostly catfish, unless someone came ‘round in their pick-up truck with crawfish or crabs from the bayou (we would trade them for beef or honey).
The phone rarely rang. My grandfather never picked it up, never. When it rang he would say, “shit on that thing”. My grandfather believed if you wanted to talk with someone it had to be face-to-face. “If someone wants to talk wit’ me Cole, they come ‘round the house.” If he wanted to talk with someone, he went “round their house”…it was simple (I’m sure he is rolling over in his grave to think about mobile/cell phones - this would be his idea of hell). Only my grandmother used the phone - to talk with her clients and her children who had moved away from the farm.
There were limits…everywhere….and it was ok.
What happened? In just the span of my lifetime limits are an unthinkable impediment. We are told by our culture, mostly through media, that borders, boundaries, restrictions and limitations are inconceivable. We now, seemingly, have no limits - no limits on movement, no limits on resources, no limits on consumption of any kind.
Without limits we find ourselves in a world where we can do or say or have whatever we want regardless of its impact on others, regardless of it’s impact on the Earth; but, we are always under limits ourselves because we are human - we are mortal, and our life has a limit….we call that death. We also have other limits - limited strength, limited reach, limited hearing and sight, etc. We are limited. There are limits around us, too, like gravity.
I think we know deep down (or in our rex brain, maybe) that limits are intrinsic to human life because, if we look around, we see humans imposing limits…we build fences around our properties, we segregate ourselves and our possessions, we isolate in nuclear families, split into factions. Something deep inside us knows and desires boundaries, desires limits.
So, if we actually desire limits why do we also desire limitlessness?
Pleasure. We also desire pleasure. We are hard-wired to seek pleasure, it touches that part of our brain that makes us feel good and we want more. We find ‘more’ and consume it, then we need even more to satisfy the pleasure so we consume more; but soon, the pleasure is gone and we are in a desperate state - we must find MORE.
Upon discussing this topic with my partner, he said to me, “Pleasure in the short-term increases your misery in the long-term.” I thought that was well-said.
Paul Kingsnorth said it this way:
“What I am really trying to get at here is not a theory or a structure or an ideological claim, but something deeper: an old, surging force, one that stems from within us. A force which has driven all this onwards, which is the lifeblood of the Machine, and which, through its untrammelling, acts as an acid which burns through all past structures and values. An acid which is now acting to dissolve our ecosystems and cultural forms, as it has dissolved so much else.
What is this force? What could be so powerful that it could dissolve away centuries of our cultural inheritance; could dissolve forests and oceans, great faiths, nations, traditions - everything that makes a human life real - and replace it with this … Pleasure Dome?
Want. Want is the acid.”
This is where the necessity of limits comes in. We must learn, then practice, Restraint - practice staying within our limits. If we don’t, the pleasure center of our brain takes control. Restraint requires practice.
Maybe learning Restraint also requires us to look at limits differently:
“Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements…to fullness of relationship and meaning.” - Wendell Berry
In an essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer entitled Ancient Green, she discuses how successful mosses have been through time, when other living things have become extinct, due to their “enoughness”:
“Moss lifeways offer a strong contrast to the ways we’ve organized our society, which prioritizes relentless growth as the metric of well-being: always getting bigger, producing more, having more. Infinite growth is ecologically impossible and exceedingly destructive, as it demands the transformation of the lives of other beings into raw materials to feed the fiction. Mosses show us another way—the abundance that emanates from self-restraint, from enoughness. Mosses have lived too long on this planet to be seduced by the nonsense of accumulation, the delusion of permanence, the endless striving for productivity. Maybe our heartbeats slow when we sit with mosses because they remind us that contentment could be ours.”
Contentment could be ours….if we learn to make peace with limit.