You don’t know what you’re capable of accomplishing until you are pushed to your limits.
God puts us on this earth for reasons that lie on the other side of understanding. We do not know the who, the where or the what of the world. In essence, Adam and Eve experienced the prime example of what it means to be thrown into the world. Cold, naked and afraid, they were forced to make sense of the raw earth on which they now stood – paradise or not. Their circumstances define the essence of existentialism. That is, if you believe in the godlessness of this philosophy. Otherwise, if you believe, as I do, that God created man, then we must also ask, why?
Isn’t that the question of a lifetime – what is the meaning of life? It has been asked and answered with the philosopher’s stone, the Bible, happiness, kindness and struggle. Though I’m in no condition or state of preparedness, much less authority, to answer that question I must admit it does come up a lot. If I had to take a shot at it at this particular moment in time, I would have to say the meaning is creation. It is active and dynamic. It is not words whispered to you under the golden light of the moon. It has to do with what you find out about yourself when tested, when pushed to the limits that you set for yourself.
Recently, my team and I were tested and pushed to our maximum capacity. It started with a call one morning to prepare 60 individually packaged meals that night for dinner. That wasn’t terribly outside of our wheelhouse, so the team said sure thing. That night when they picked up the meals, they asked for breakfast and lunch to be prepared for the next day. At the same time. By 6am. For 60 people. OK, so this was a little outside of our usual course of business but certainly doable and we’d be happy to accommodate. Then it turned to 120 dinners. And 120 breakfasts and lunches by 6 am the next morning. At that time, we thought there was no way we could do any more. Yet we did. We kept pushing. By the fourth day, we were on track to prepare and individually package 500 meals a day. We thought that was our maximum capacity. Then something miraculous happened: We were pushed even further. The calls kept coming for more.
Our kitchen staff arrived by 3 a.m. I arrived at 4 a.m. one morning wondering how we were going to get through it all. I was tired, sure. But more than that, I was unsure and overwhelmed. Until I got there and experienced something I didn’t expect. It was a sense of peace. Everyone was moving to the pace of necessity. Cooks were in their stations – chopping, prepping, cooking and folding. They were in the zone. More than I was. They moved with conviction and purpose. The extra staff from the front of the house that came in to help sorted, packaged, and got systems ready. What I thought was impossible kept becoming more and more possible.
On the final day of our test, one week after the first call, we packaged 900 meals on top of servicing our regular customers. We doubled the natural output of our capacity on that day. Without warning, without hesitation, we were stretched to our limit.
The lesson I learned is that limitations and belief lids – the top of what we think we can achieve – are meant to be broken. But more to the point, what we think we can achieve as our outer limit is a lid to our thinking that is so completely artificial and arbitrary we don’t even see how fake it is. There is a study that is said to have taken place. A fish was placed in a tank with a piece of glass dividing the tank into two sections. The fish kept hitting the glass only to realize it could not swim to the other side. Eventually, the glass was removed. But the fish never again tested the limits of its boundaries. We are not that different from the fish. Haunted by boundaries from our past – our parents telling us not to wander too far, or that one person in our childhood who said we’d never amount to anything – we hold ourselves back. But each day as we prepared more meals, we raised our perception of what our own capabilities were. We need to do more of that.
When we ask what it means to live on this earth, I’ve learned that it always involves our ability to overcome. It involves helping one another. And it involves believing in ourselves.
Today’s article is dedicated to my mom, who would have turned 81 on Monday. She never had a belief lid.
Javier Sanchez is an El Rito Media columnist and investor, former Española mayor and a restaurant owner. The opinions in this column are his own and do not reflect those of El Rito Media.
