What Are You Capable Of?

“If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” — Thomas Edison

I came home from Florida today to find the quote above on Kevin Hall’s Facebook page.   Kevin is the author of one of my absolute favorite books:  Aspire, Discovering Your Purpose Through the Power of Words. Kevin is full of inspirational quotes on his Facebook page and I’ve treasured many of the quotes he shares in his book as well.   His quote today by Thomas Edison made me think back to a year ago this month.  I went down to the World Barefoot Center and got back on the water again.  Life hasn’t been the same since.

How many of us hold back because we have a million and one excuses of why we can’t accomplish something that seems so beyond our reach?  How many of us even try?  How many of us wishfully want to do something but we resign ourselves to the idea that it’s beyond our capabilities?

Yeah, that was me a year ago.  If you told me back in March of last year that I would be barefoot water skiing backwards on my feet a year later, I would have slapped my thigh a couple of times and laughed you out of town. “That’s impossible,” I would have said.  “I’m not capable of that!”

Because you see, this was me a year ago, hanging on the boom and putting my feet in the water for the first time in many years:

Now remember that quote by Edison above? I’ve learned some incredible lessons in the past year. I had no idea what I was capable of until I started to explore the limits and push past some of the boundaries in my mind. How do you know what the limits are, until you push past them? It wasn’t just barefooting, it applied to many other areas of life as well. “You’re just having a mid-life crisis,” one friend told me as she shook her head. I couldn’t quite agree with her. I call it a mid-life “awakening,” and I’m thankful for it. I’m thankful for the people who’ve crossed my path and joined me on this awakening– the ones who push me to new limits and tell me “Yes, you certainly can!” Because you see, Kevin Hall has another inspirational quote that he often shares, one by Joseph Campbell: “When you follow your bliss, you put yourself on the track that has been there all the while… you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open doors to you.”

How true this has been in the past year–I’ve met so many amazing people in the path of following bliss that so many doors flew wide open as a result. And little by little, I began stretching the limits of what I thought I was capable of with the help of the wonderful folks who have crossed my path.

A year ago, indeed, I would have thought it was impossible to even imagine myself barefooting backwards on my feet, but that’s just what I found myself doing this week:

So let me ask you, what are you holding back on? Let yourself be astounded by the things you can do. Start today to move yourself toward your bliss.