Whatever Limits Us, We Call Fate
It's easier that way

In a minute, I will share a secret that has kept me prisoner for too long. It’s about a cage and the limits it has created in my life.

What limits you?

What limits you? What keeps you from doing the things you dream of? What are those forces, known only to you, that block your forward movement?

The title of this article is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. It speaks to the safety of living inside padded cages where we are protected from the afflictions that freedom risks. 

We can wrap our limits around us like Linus’s security blanket, all the while yelling, “Dammit, it’s just plain fate that I can’t move – if this damn blanket weren’t in the way, I’d be a force to be reckoned with!!”

Yeah, right.

Nobody claps for you at 4:00 a.m. 

Getting scraped, bruised, ridiculed, and, occasionally, bloodied is the price we pay for escaping our cages and abandoning our limits. You can do all your homework and be as prepared as humanly possible, but if you don’t jump on the saddle and ride, you are going absolutely nowhere.

When I was working full-time as a teacher, going to graduate school in the evening, and training for long-distance triathlons, the temptation to sit quietly in my cage and sleep was tempting. It was like a fly being drawn down into a Venus flytrap.  

My alarm would go off at 3:30 a.m. Having prepared my workout gear the night before, I quietly got up so as not to wake my wife, shuffled into the kitchen, and brewed a cup of coffee.  

“Is this really worth it?” was a thought I had countless times. I ignored it.

I did everything I could to stack the deck in favor of success, in favor of not falling victim to “Oh, it’s just fate that I can’t compete in Ironman–it’s all this grad school and teaching stuff that’s in the way.”

Fate, hell.  

In 2015, after multiple attempts, I crossed the finish line at Ironman Florida.

Yes, it was totally worth it.

Fate is a myth

Fate is a myth created by people who refuse to accept agency – who will tell you what they want to do is impossible. And, if you achieve that very same thing, they won’t be at the finish line clapping for you.

I would ride my bike 40 miles before most people got out of bed. I would shower at my gym and drive straight to work, arriving 45 minutes before the first bell. It was dark when I pulled into the parking lot.

I squeezed every drop of possibility from every second, every day. If there was a human equivalent of an orange-squeezing machine, I was it. My mantra was simple.

DO NOT WASTE TIME.

In July 2022, I lost my mother to leukemia. She was 88 years old. When she did, she was under Hospice care, which did a phenomenal job of making her final days as painless as possible. But Hospice couldn’t touch her existential pain – the pain of realizing she had never truly lived.

Regrets suck.

When she breathed her last, and her pulse ceased, my father and my two brothers sat around her on the hospital bed. I know that death happens all the time, but it only happens once to your mother.

I sat there, looking at her expressionless face, suddenly aware that it would never smile again. My mother died with a truckload of regrets. 

Almost all of those regrets were about seeking the relative safety of a cage and not living life as a daring adventure. She never graduated from college, never learned how to speak French, never went on a hike, never went sledding, and never learned how to dance.

Instead, she wasted her time, immersed in alcohol and romance novels.  In my life, I’ve met many people, confined to cages of their own design, who also sought comfort in such things.

What are the landmines that you plant to keep you in your cage?

Last year, I gave up drinking alcohol entirely. I didn’t need to continue planting landmines in my path, landmines that kept me confined to a cage.

Can I let you in on a secret? I’m embarrassed to be sharing this, but here it goes.

When is a secret no longer worth holding onto?

I started writing for Medium last November. For decades, I had lived in my own version of a cage. Finally, I got so angry at myself that I stood up, grabbed the hidden key out of my pocket, and unlocked the door. You see, I had the key all along. But that’s not the secret.

I haven’t been able to read the comments from my readers. 

I get paralyzed with fear at what I might discover. Am I a fraud? Do I belong back in my cage?  As was true for my mother, I have decided that it’s easier not to read them and pretend that those comments don’t matter than it is to sit down and read what these wonderful men and women, people like you, have to say.

We all have cages to contend with. Today, I opened one of mine. I went back to my earliest stories and began reading comments. 

They were joyous – not a single snarky comment. 

National Open Your Cage Day.

We should have a federal holiday called “National Open Your Cage” day. It would be a day when we all would courageously reflect on what is holding us back.

Taking inventory of our cages and what they prevent us from experiencing would result in a drastic reduction in regrets when we are lying on our deathbeds, surrounded by loved ones.

You’re a damn cheetah!

If you haven’t already read Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, you owe it to yourself to buy a copy. It’s all about the cages we live in. In her book, she tells the story of visiting a zoo with her daughter, where they watched in horror as a caged cheetah was released, only to pursue a rabbit tied to the back bumper of a jeep.

That cheetah had forgotten who it was. It had become so accustomed to limits that it believed it was just a toy. No, you’re a damn cheetah!

You and I are like that cheetah.

We need to remember who we are.