The Life We've Been Thrown

Middle-Age and the Gift of Limitation

I’m middle-aged. According to pop-movies I should want to by a sports car, start acting like a teenager again, think a lot about the sports career I never had, and perhaps start making some rather poor ethical decisions because this is what a mid-life crisis looks like. I’m not interested in a buying a sports car. I have a lot more grays than I did a few years ago and the pounds fall off a little slower these days. While I do want to shed some pounds and try and hide the grays (when I remember to), I have no illusions that I can restore my youth and very much strive to make wise ethical decisions in order to never lose the precious gifts that have been given to me, not least, my family. If middle-age has given me any kind of crisis, it is one of time. When you’re young you are under the illusion that life is filled with infinite possibilities. Being young, of course, does present you with more opportunities if for no other reason than you have more time and thus a longer ramp on which to make choices. But time is limit, and the less you have the more limit increases. Yet time is not the only determining factor in our limitations. Aside from physical limitations which prohibit us from some things, we also have gift limitations which means we excel at certain things, are mediocre at others, and then not very good at still others. While many want to be a pop star when they are young, the truth is that some are born tone deaf or are not especially musically inclined and the possibility is thus eliminated no matter how much time is given. Equally true, one can be very gifted in this area but discover this gift later or have focused their energies elsewhere. Time is a limit that we can see increasingly with age, yet perhaps the biggest limitations placed on us are the ones that we can’t fully see, and can only partially see with help and, ironically(?), time.

I’ve read many of James K. A. Smith’s books, including his wonderful and influential cultural liturgies trilogy, but How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now, is perhaps my favorites of Smith’s. In this work, Smith takes a deep look into the human person as a storied person whose life has been effected by the web of the stories of others – those who have gone before them and those around them now who have themselves been effected by the web of the stories of others before them. Smith explains,

“Our bodies are not jut clocks; they are time capsules…What I aspire to is a factor of what I’ve inherited. What I imagine as a possible future—even what I can hear as a ‘calling’—is a reflection of what my past has made imaginable. Our now is always bequeathed to us.”^⁠¹

What has been bequeathed to us both presents us with opportunities but also with limitations. To help us understand, Smith draws on Martin Heidegger’s concept of “thrown possibility.”^⁠² (It should be noted here that while Heidegger’s concept is helpful, his history is problematic.)^⁠³ So what is “thrown possibility?”^⁠⁴ To state it as basically as possible, the life we live is one we’ve been “thrown into.” We didn’t choose our family of origin, our geographical location, or the history which has shaped both our people and our place and therefore us in ways beyond our imagination. We’ve been thrown into this “meshwork” which makes us who we are. Norman Wirzba explains the difference between a network, language we often use to speak of “community,” and the more accurate language of meshwork in his important book This Sacred Life:

“What network thinking does is argue that self-contained bodies do not exist in isolation.”

This is true. We are connected. Meshwork goes further, however:

“Meshwork thinking….[states] that things are their relations.”^⁠⁵

We are not, contrary to popular thinking, autonomous beings with the “whole world before us,” presented as infinite choices through which we can create our own destiny—be whatever we want to be. But this doesn’t simply mean that the choices we make are conditioned by the environments in which we were raised, but further, even the possibility of choices available to us were also thrown to us, or we to them. Smith again:

“the way in which even the life I’ve made for myself, the accumulation of a thousand choices and decisions, still feels like a life I’ve been thrown into [is] because, in some fundamental sense, the possibilities were decided for me before I ever emerged on the scene.”^⁠⁶

All of this feels like bad news in a time when we are obsessed with building our own identities. As I mentioned above, it is also particularly heavy in middle age. As Smith wisely notes,

“To recognize contingency without melancholy or malaise is one of the hardest disciplines of spiritual timekeeping.”^⁠⁷

Indeed. And yet there is (at least) a two-fold gift in this narrowing, felt more deeply at some stages of life than others. The first is that if it is, in fact, to be taken as gift, limitation is necessarily worked out in community. My limits are not always obvious to me and so I need others to help me understand what is, and is not, my limitation. Wirzba writes:

I can be mistaken about my own limits or the limits of my context, and thereby sell myself or the context short and miss out on some opportunity; but I might also exaggerate my potential and thus consign myself to frustrating and futile pursuits. This is why marking out the limits and potential of a place or a creature is something that is worked out through trial and error and in conversation with others.⁸

My friend Matthew, a philosopher, recently asked if I’d like to join him and set aside a morning a week committed to writing. I said I would love this. He asked what I was working on. I said, “Well, I’m working on my thesis, I’m writing a book, I’m also writing personal blog posts and posts for the church and, of course, sermons.” He looked at me and said point blank, “Just write your thesis.” I know this sounds strange, but I can’t tell you how freeing this was. Suddenly my reading became very focused, and I’ve been spending that morning really making significant progress. It’s been life-giving. The narrowing was a gift, but this gift came through someone who realized that my efforts to do everything were leading me to do, or at least complete, very little. And yes, I am aware of the irony of telling you this in a personal blog post, but I’ve found another dedicated time for writing things like this and it takes a back seat to my academic writing. The book writing is completely on hold. I will return to it, but only when I am able to focus on it and not ten other things. I know others have a different approach, but this works with my throwness. This all leads to the second gift of limit. Wirzba continues the above by stating,

“The desire to have a limitless life is dangerous because in it the ability to appreciate completion or enough are gone. Limit and form go together. A life that respects no limits cannot respect the form of another’s being, the very characteristics that make the particular thing that it is.”^⁠⁹

I’m tempted to engage Bonhoeffer here, but I will limit myself by saving that for another time. At the end of the day I have particular gifts, a certain bent, and I have things that I’m not gifted at, or not gifted enough at to merit my time. This is all part of my throwness. When I was young I wanted to play basketball and dreamed of the NBA. I enjoyed basketball, but I wasn’t a particularly talented athletically. But through the years I realized that there were other things that I was both gifted in and interested in and so had to reject somethings in order to lean into those. The possibilities were thrown my way in the first place and now what to do with them, with the limited time I have are to be worked out, but not alone. As the years go by, the narrowing becomes more and more important. Yet as things have narrowed I’ve been surprised at how I’ve been surrounded by people who let me know that I’m mistaken about some of my limits and am not too old for some pursuits like I’ve told myself, but who also help me realize that I can’t do everything. I’ve been thrown into this life, and not only my options, but even my possibilities are limited. I can’t do everything. But I can do some things, and maybe even a few of them well (which doesn’t mean being “the best,” which is a soul destroying pursuit), and I think that if I can embrace this “contingency without melancholy or malaise,” I might be able to journey through middle age with great joy. This is the task before me. It is, in fact, the task before us all, and one that we must approach together.

1. James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022), 58.

2. ibid., 59.

3. As Norman Wirzba writes, “Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi party in May 1933, just days after assuming the role of rector of the University of Freiburg, proclaimed in his inaugural address entitled ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University,’ that National Socialism held the potential to restore the German people not only to national purpose and greatness but lead them into a discovery of the profound depths of existence and meaning of life.” Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity's Place in a Wounded World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 186.

4. Smith, How to Inhabit Time, 32.

5. Wirzba, This Sacred Life, 119.

6. ibid.

7. Smith, How to Inhabit Time, 67.

8. Wiraba, This Sacred Life, 28.

9. ibid.