A long time ago, and for a long time — from the late 1980s to the early 2000s — I worked as a bartender. And I was a great bartender, because I’m always dedicated to doing my best (what’s the point of doing anything at all if you’re going to do it half-assed?)
During the mid ’90s or so, my friend Chris Sheppard (a famous DJ in Toronto that then became a musician in the dance bands BKS and Love Inc) used to do what he wanted… play what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted to.
He was the first person I ever heard mix New Order with AC/DC in the late ’80s. At the time I thought, “you can’t mix new wave with heavy rock”… but once I heard the results I opened my mind beyond the labels people were obsessed with back then, and stopped “shoulding on” people for the music they liked.
And I remember a song he used to play a lot in the dance music heyday of the ’90s, called “No Limit” by 2 Unlimited. It’s pretty cheesey, but here’s the video if you don’t remember it:
During the middle of the song, Chris would always turn down the volume and sing into the mic, “There’s no lyrics!” instead of “There’s no limit.”
If you listen to the song, you’ll know why he was saying that… but why the heck am I bringing this up now?
Barry and I, along with Jody Sachse, run a company called LWL Worldwide (the LWL stands for “Life Without Limits“).
So, obviously people ask us, what does it mean to live a “Life Without Limits”?
The song “No Limit” often does come to my mind when I think about that. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The song says, “we’ll reach for the sky… no valley too deep, no mountain too high…”
And yes, that’s true when you’re living a life without limits. But what does it mean when applied to our real lives?
Song lyrics often do a great job of communicating what we’re feeling, what we really want to say. But they also are often written in metaphors.
I love metaphors, but their purpose is to represent something.
We can’t live metaphors… we can only live the truth behind the metaphor.
So here’s my take on the real-life version of “No Limits”.
To me, living a life without limits means knowing that we all have fears… but being willing to face them, knowing that what awaits on the other side is bigger, better and brighter than anything we’ve even dreamed of before.
Living a life without limits means doing what we never thought we’d be able to, and proving to the world (including ourselves) that we can not only do it, but do a damn good job of it.
Living a life without limits means accepting that we’re worthy… that we deserve wealth, health, happiness and love. And opening our hearts to accept and embrace it.
Living a life without limits means doing what we love, and allowing the money to follow. It also means never doing what we love for free, just because we love to do it… because what we love is also almost always what comes easy, and hence what we’re good at. That makes it valuable to other people, and needs to be respected for what it’s worth.
Living a life without limits means being grateful every day for what we have… knowing that the gratitude will bring us more of the same, yet at the same time not settling for what we have, but always striving for the best life has to offer.
Living a life without limits means taking action when it will move us towards our purpose or mission… but not taking action just because somebody told us to.
Living a life without limits means working hard, but knowing when it’s time to take a step back and play hard too. In short… to live hard, because if there are no limits, why be soft about what we want?
Living a life without limits also means loving hard. Love is the best feeling in the world… the most powerful manifesting emotion, the embodiment of all other emotions, and the equivalent of energy, spirit and matter all rolled into one (which are all actually the same thing, according to quantum physics).
True to form, yesterday I was conscious of living a life without limits.
Barry and I went to see the alpacas at Alpaca Farm Day first (more on that in yesterday’s post)… and then we threw caution to the wind and went to Cave Junction in search of a place we had just heard about from another alpaca viewer, where you can ride horses or stay in a treehouse at a “treesort” called Out ‘N About.
We had no agenda; we weren’t attached to the outcome.
Along the way, we stopped at a gift shop and I bought a Thunderegg, the Oregon State Stone… those things that look like plain grey rocks on the outside, but are full of sparkly agate on the inside. The epitome of not being able to judge a book by the cover, and a vivid metaphoric example of how our insides are often far more fascinating and powerful and valuable than our outsides.
We took a tour down several side roads, looking for someone who might know where we needed to go and what we should find when we got there.
We saw a sign where somebody was advertising “Sweet Cron” but selling Sweet Corn. But hey — that’s living a life without limits, because they didn’t get caught up in what’s not possible, didn’t get caught up in perfectionism, but lived by the credo “you don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.”
(That’s the first step to living a life without limits; it’s just called living, and then you add the no limits part later.)
And, when we finally found the “treesort”, which is well hidden in a private area of the Southern Oregon forests… I did what at one time I never would have wanted to do, and I did it in my quest for living a life without limits.
I first climbed high into the trees and walked along a swinging rope bridge as we explored the treehouse lodging. Then I swung from a big rope swing hung from the trees. In fact, I was ready to take a zipline ride through the trees, but we got there kind of late and didn’t want to get tied down to their schedule (it’s about “no limits”, after all!)
Here’s the video I made from the treetops:
[Video coming soon].
So in short, living a life without limits means doing whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it, and with whoever you want to… but also doing things you never thought you wanted to do, in order to stretch yourself, grow out of your comfort zone, achieve more in life, and find out how far you can actually push your own limits… before discovering that they don’t exist.
“We’ll reach for the sky… no valley too deep, no mountain too high…”
Keep Unwrapping the Mysteries of Life!
