It is interesting to ask: what are the limits you have set for your life? Where are the lines of these limits? Why do you think you cannot go beyond them? Did you construct these limits out of anxiety and fear?*
(John O’Donohue)

The path of our creativity and beauty is greater than the place we find ourselves:

The awakening of the beauty of your creativity can totally change the way you view limits.*

John O’Donohue writes about how our creativity changes the way we see.

Instead of being barriers stopping us they are thresholds to cross:

When you see the limit not as a confining barrier but as a threshold, you are already beyond.*

Our path of creativity comes with passion and imagination to carry us farther than we might ordinarily imagine.

As I read O’Donohue’s mention of thresholds, I consider their larger nature, as liminal spaces.

These are often uncomfortable and unfamiliar to us.

They make ignorant, incompetent, noviciates: all experiences we have sought to leave rather than arrive at:

We are confronted with an unattractive direction that we have to take. For weeks or months we have to travel through limbo; the comfort and security of our familiar belonging lies far beyond us. Where we will belong next has not yet become clear.*

Such experiences also offend our need to move and arrive quickly, but life in our universe seems to be set up differently to how our cultures frame it. There is much to valued in a slow journey in the same direction.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz offer a different understanding of direction and purpose which includes three movements:

Purpose becomes a more powerful and enduring source of energy in our lives in three ways: when its sources moves from negative to positive, external to internal and self to others.**

These movements allow us to both consider and measure the path we are on, so that if we find it incapable of accommodating these movements then we will find another path.

But if it is truly a path of imagination, creativity and beauty then we will begin to see the possibilities:

The beauty of imagination helps you to see the limit as an invitation to venture forth and view the world and your role in it as full of beautiful possibilities in how you think feel and act … possibility is the gift of creativity.*

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**From Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s The Power of Full Engagement.