It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively in love with limits. He uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving-stones. He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving-stones, in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself…
I have [played] myself, by piling all the things I wanted on a sofa, and imagining that the carpet around me was the surrounding sea.
This game of self-limitation is one of the secret pleasures of life.
– G.K. Chesterton, The Romance of Childhood, from In Defense of Sanity, pp. 251-252
I thought of this quote yesterday and had to go back and look it up. My wife and I were walking with our children in a large outdoor shopping center. Throughout the plaza are large, elevated patches of garden holding various plants. As is always the case when we visit there, my daughters climbed up the planter walls and started using them as balance beams. We were surrounded by space: sidewalks, roads, stores. And they limited themselves to the smallest space available. So, I said to my wife, Chesterton is right. She had no idea what I was talking about (but that’s beside the point).
Every time we walk through Kroger, with its black and white tiled floors, the choosing of a particular color to step on ensues; every time they wander off into the neighborhood, we always find them coming home – to a small house in a big world.
Last year I listened to an interview of a wide receiver in the NFL. He talked about learning to run routes. In college he usually ran straight down the field or wandered around through zone coverages until he found an opening. Now, in the NFL, he had learned the discipline of proper route-running. He found, he said, that limiting yourself to one route and one sure destination freed him up to play at his fastest (which is 4.3/40 fast). If you know where you are going, you can run hard to get there. If the route is sure, you can knock obstacles out of the way to get to that spot. It limits you, but it makes you faster.
There is a romance and liberty in limitation if we have eyes to see. If all were right, a man who limits himself to one wife would find romance and liberty. If all were right, a man who limits himself to one God would find romance and liberty. For romance and liberty do not demand wide open spaces; they only demand a willingness to see the beauty of the limitation itself. Can your children see this better than you?
