On Growing Past My Limitations

Last week I wrote about accepting my limitations, and even blessing them for what they can teach me. But limits are funny things: some of them are static, while others are wonderfully elastic. By that I mean that we can stretch them and grow stronger because we've challenged ourselves.

Moving to Marrakesh has tested my limits in just about every way conceivable. And because my elastic limits are being stretched, I'm growing in my square footage of ability (to use a math metaphor). Or to draw on my graduate studies in education, I'm seeing the reality of Krashen's Hypothesis in my own life. In the field of Second Language Acquisition, this is the theory that students best learn new vocabulary when they read a text that is equal to i + 1, meaning at their current target language level plus one step above that level. If students read only texts that are at or below their current level, they do not grow in their target language acquisition. If they read texts that are too far above their current level, they cannot access the content due to the level of difficulty they face.

Krashen's Hypothesis has been on my mind lately. I thought I was challenging myself back in the states, but the growth I've been doing here far outpaces my growth at home. I'll give you an example. One area where I'm seeing a lot of personal growth is in my willingness to live with uncertainty. My natural inclination is to have every plan firmly nailed down, every detail for the future mapped out and planned on an itinerary. (For example, if you've ever traveled with me, you know of my spreadsheets and itineraries.) And while I still believe that planning out the future can be useful, it can also be really harmful when I idolize these castles in the sky.

Maybe it's living in Marrakesh that is changing my self-parasitic tendency to prioritize the future over the present, or maybe it was the jolt of upending my life and moving here in the first place that did it. What matters, really, is that my belief that I could never let go of this unhappy way of being has been shattered by expanding past my limits.

And it's funny, sometimes it's hard to tell which limits are static and which are elastic until your circumstances force you to find out. What happy people we would be if we could learn to adjust and bless and grow as we needed to! For my part, for the present, I'll be living in a state of happy uncertainty and looking forward to the next area of growth that life throws my way.