Emily Dickenson used to talk about something she called "circumference." People disagree about what exactly she meant, but basically, she was talking about human limitations. Emily described circumference like a giant bubble that surrounds the earth. She said people try to reach out of the earth--for God or dreams or whatever--and collide with the bubble.
For the past four months, I've had a lot of time off. When I heard that at the beginning of those four months how much free time I was going to have, I was ecstatic. My mind raced, thinking up a million different goals I could pursue. Looking back, however, although I've done some interesting and some useful stuff, I'm mostly amazed at how little I've done. All the free days have blown by in a constantly accelerating blur. My motivation has atrophied like a desicated plant. The ambitions that popped into my head at the beginning of the last four months have been obscured by time, like sunlight obscured by a fog.
Emily had it right. We humans are always hitting our heads on an invisible wall that keeps us just out of reach of something. We see far, but we can never seem to walk nearly as far as we see. It's like the adage about eyes bigger than stomaches--our dreams are bigger than our arms, and we can never seem to quite hold them down.
