Testing Your Limits

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Testing Your Limits

You are on a no limits expedition in which there is no limit to how good your life can become. There are no limits to how much good you can accomplish during your stay on planet earth.

Life is a test, and if you don't quit, you pass the test. Quitting is a terminal disease for which their is no cure, and doubting is nearly as bad. If you are going to doubt anything at all, you should doubt your limits.

There are two ways to live. One is looking for your limits, and the other is testing your limits.

Some people look for their limits.

They travel through life reading all the signs. Stop, Go, Speed Limit 60 mph, Detour, Exit Only, No left Turn.

They go wherever the signs take them. They let the signs define their life. They are always looking for limits and asking for permission.

Other people test their limits.

When they travel through life, they don't look for signs. They don't need anyone to tell them what they can and cannot do.

When they reach what appears to be a limit, they test it to see if it's real, and they blow through their limits again and again.

These are the people who run the four minute mile, who are blind and still climb mount Everest, who win the tour de France seven times even though they had cancer.

That's your choice; you look for your limits or test them.

The way you handle limits makes all the difference in your life.

Sand driving teaches you about your limitations.

The first lesson you learn is that appearances are deceiving.

Traversing a sea of sand may look like a piece of cake, but fifteen seconds later you are monumentally stuck with sand up to your chassis.

At other times, you look at what appears to be difficult terrain, and you pass easily through it like you're driving in a mall parking lot.

You can't tell ahead of time how hard the slogging will become until you get into gear and start moving. Appearances truly are deceiving.

The second lesson you learn is that the only way to find out if limitations are real is to test them.

If you want to live your sand dreams, you have to test the sand all the time.

You must allow yourself the luxury of testing your limitations many times each day.

When you do that, you discover that you can do many things you previously considered impossible.

Take a look at the wheel tracks in this picture. One pair of tracks leads to a Defender far off in the distance.

When he went down the slip face into the valley of doom, he kept on trucking. You can see two patches of soft sand in his wheel tracks where he powered through without getting stuck.

The second set of tracks belongs to a Nissan Patrol.

This vehicle went into the valley of doom and got stuck. His tracks show that he almost made it out the other side on his first attempt, but he had to back up and make another try. He made it out on his second go.

I'm standing on top of the dune surveying the landscape trying to figure out which way to head.

I had no clue as to whether I would get stuck in the valley of doom, but I also had no choice. If I wanted to test my limitations, I had to go down the slip face and see what happened. I put the accelerator all the way to the floor in second gear when I hit the bottom of the slip face, and I easily powered out of the hole.

That's the way life works.

There's hundreds of sand traps out there, and if you want to drive in the sand, it's inevitable that you will discover many pits of apparent despair. That's to be expected, because you are living your sand dreams.

If you want to live your dreams, you must test your limitations every day. There is no other way.

Dr. Dave