Boundaries and the Edges That Define Us

As a photographer, I've always been visually interested in borders and boundaries--the fences we build, the stone walls dividing land, the doors between rooms, the horizon line separating the sea and sky. Of course, borders define our homes and our towns--two entities that we probably feel we know pretty well. So, I was pleasantly surprised last weekend to take a historical tour of my town with my family and discover twenty-six nationally registered landmarks within its twenty-one square miles. Twenty-six landmarks! Before the tour, I would have been hard-pressed to name four of them, but there they were, all with their plaques and dates, proving their hard-won histories.

My favorite was a Quaker meeting house dating back to 1758. Although I've lived in this New Jersey town for just over seven years and felt like I really knew my way around it, I never even knew this meeting house existed until three weeks ago, when my son wrote a social studies report on it. I had never been down this particular road before, and it made me wonder what else I could discover within these seemingly familiar boundaries.

A few months back, I read a beautifully written novel about discovery (especially self-discovery) and pushing physical and emotional limits, called The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The main character, without any planning or even proper footwear, just starts walking across the whole of England because he learns an old friend is dying at the northernmost point of the country. His feet just sort of propel him forward, toward his friend. I'm a big book-underliner, and by the time I reached the last page, this book was thoroughly marked-up with passages I loved, including this one:

"The sun pressed warm on the back of his head and shoulders as he strolled down the avenues of new housing. Harold glanced in at people's windows, and sometimes they were empty, and sometimes people were staring right back at him and he felt obliged to rush on. Sometimes, though, there was an object that he didn't expect; a porcelain figure, or a vase, and even a tuba. The tender pieces of themselves that people staked as boundaries against the outside world."

The book is all about Harold taking notice of things large and small, expanding where he thought he could go emotionally and physically, seeing familiar things in a different light, and seeing new things altogether. (I devoured it.)

I had the good fortune (and great timing!) last week to turn on the TV for a quick check on the weather and instead find one of my favorite musicians, Yo-Yo Ma, speaking on "CBS This Morning" about his new CD, A Playlist Without Borders. I could listen to Yo-Yo Ma all day long, and I don't just mean his recent masterpieces or those YouTube videos of him as a child prodigy. But here's what he said that really struck a chord with me (oh, dear--horrible pun unintended!):

"In terms of our borders, we determine our borders. Some of them are political, some of them are demographic-economic borders, but then there's the border of the imagination. And that one, we have the most control over. We can control where our own edges are, and that's where the growth happens."

I loved his sentiment of exploring the boundaries of imagination within ourselves. Because we don't always need a guided tour for everything. Sometimes, even if we stay in one place, quietly looking inward, we can stretch our boundaries in ways we never thought were possible.

Your turn: Are there things in your town or city that you've only just discovered? Have you ever pushed the limits of your physical or mental strength to try something new? Please share in the Comments section below. If you are reading this post via email subscription or mobile device, click on the title or go to www.JoyfullyGreen.com from a computer to see the comments and leave one of your own. (Don't forget to click the box for subscribing to comments so you can follow the conversation.)

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