Limited by awareness...

I was thinking sometime ago how it was when I was a kid. I knew no limitations. And growing up was, amongst other things, a gradual discovery of those limitations. Some real, but perhaps most imposed falsely by my experiences.

The first instance that I clearly remember of being surprised by what I could not do was when I joined a boarding school in the 5th Grade and ran a mini cross-country in the first few days. We had to take a round of an inner circular road of the school, starting at our boarding house and ending there as well.

I think I sprinted the first few minutes with a sense of belief that I could keep going like that the whole distance and beat everyone. Then after a few hundred metres the tiredness set in. Unexpected development this. I dropped to a slower pace. Then the legs started giving away. Slower still now. Then went out of breath. So a jogging pace. And then, at least that's how I think it was, an embarrassing sense of awareness struck- other boys were surely faster. And they could run longer (at that age I did not know what stamina or endurance actually meant). There were many others behind of course. But I only cared for those ahead. And I sort of decided I could not do long distance (in the days to follow I afforded this status to short distance as well).

There it was. The first sense of limitation. There were of course instances before that where I would not have performed as well as others. It could be anything- sports or studies. But until this point I never thought of not coming ‘first’ as a limitation. It was something I never cared to understand. Maybe because I didn't know what winning meant either. Or perhaps thought that coming on top was all a matter of chance.

Unfortunately, I understood limitation to be an unalterable reality for a long time. So from that point onwards I never really finished a long distance run in time at all. It was only much later when I was a senior at school that I decided to give it my all. I practised hard. I thought perhaps within my limitations too there could be a higher potential that I am missing. So I decided to touch the end of the spectrum of that limitation. And after days of dogged practise when the day of the run came I started with an uneasy mind. But I ran ok. And managed to hit the top 20 in a 10km run. A purely average performance by the standards of any decent athlete I agree. But surely a big change from the previous 7 years of not finishing the race. All the same, I felt I could do better. And I saw the bubble of my limitation grow beyond the boundaries I had set earlier.

And I realized this- if I wanted to, I could do it. Most things possibly. But I seldom tried very hard. And that was my only limitation. It perhaps still is.