Borders, boundaries and limitations

Any journey we undertake has the ability to make us more aware of our boundaries, and in a sense of our limitations. This awareness then can help us to re-evaluate where we stand, and how we create and protect our boundaries. Without the limitations.

When our travels take us away from our daily lives, yet within relatively familiar surroundings ~ for instance a trip to a different part of the country you live in ~ this is a process that takes place pretty much inside ourselves. Even though it is instigated by the different, new surroundings we may find ourselves in; the new people we meet.

As our travels take us to an altogether different country, all of a sudden we are confronted with borders. Borders between the country we call our home and that other country. And also borders between our values; the rules that we live by in our daily lives and the rules and regulations of that other country that we are traveling to...
And so the process of becoming aware of our own boundaries is not just an inner journey anymore ~ it now has an outer aspect to it as well. In other words, it is not just about our reactions to the new environment, the new people we meet ~ it is perhaps even more about the circumstances we encounter, and how our values and the values of that other person (or country) can work together. Or can clash.

Either way the process of gaining awareness about our boundaries and limitations can take place. We can broaden our horizons in a fun and exciting way as we get to know new perspectives, new ways of doing things that we might not have thought of living in our own familiar area.
Yet when something happens that perhaps even gets you in a position where the border you desire to cross becomes a line in the sand ~ we are likely to feel limited by that experience, rather than feeling the expansion we were expecting...

In a sense, a lot of the borders have become ‘lines in the sand’. Where they used to be the demarkation between ‘here and there’ ~ they are now also the boundaries that we need to protect against unwanted influences, undesired actions ~ and not in the least that which we fear may put us and our environment in danger... So we limit access to that which we call our own. We limit how we behave, as well as how the other person is permitted to behave. And as we put limitations on ourselves and the new people we meet ~ we protect what is our own.

And this too, is a process that takes place on an outer, as well as on an inner level...