Motion Parallax

We’re told to be inspired by those who overcome the impossible. But what if the real story isn’t about their exceptionality, but about the distance we’ve placed between their lives and our own?

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We’ve all heard the anecdotes about remarkable people who have overcome extraordinary odds to become and achieve great things. Those born without arms who learn to paint with their feet. Those who’ve lost their legs and learn to surf again. Those who were born “legally blind,” enduring numerous surgeries and medical failures that only made things worse, only to eventually retrain their eyes to see. “And now, 40 years later, they still have their driver’s licence and can drive without glasses.”

And so, to the rest of us, those who weren’t born with disabilities or biological impediments, who haven’t suffered dramatic injury or lost limbs along the way, who haven’t “survived cancer,” or what have you, what’s our problem? If they can do it, “imagine what’s possible for you.” We watch their videos, attend their speaking engagements, and are expected to feel inspired, energized, or fundamentally changed in some way. But something else seems to happen instead.

That’s the trick, isn’t it? Do you recognize the shame inherent in these statements? The paralyzing guilt, the embodied fear of failure, even the fear of success, of missing out, of being somehow fundamentally broken or undeserving? It’s all fiction, of course, but the messaging has its effects, and in general, it is debilitating because the roots can run deep. We begin to perpetuate our own limits, handicaps, and ceilings for what’s even possible, deferring to labels, desperately seeking excuses and reasons for why we so often feel empty, angry, bored, unhappy, unfulfilled, or lonely. Maybe it’s a “chemical imbalance,” or ADHD, or some other convenient explanation.

We gravitate toward giving ourselves, or adopting, popular “issues” that can be returned to again and again, something to explain, to share, to have validated by anyone willing to listen, sympathize, accommodate, or offer us the space to reinforce the story. We point to our environment, our relationships, our diet, our parents, our boss, or our lack of gratitude. Shame introduces distortions, fragmentation, and learned helplessness.

Those striving for what seems impossible do not appear to carry those same roadblocks, or if they do, they do not waste much time before pushing through them.

It may be simpler than we think. Perhaps it is only distance.

We confuse distance with difference. What is close to us, our habits, fears, and inherited limits, feels immediate and overwhelming. What is farther away, the lives of others and what we call extraordinary, appears still, distant, almost unreal. But that distance deceives. It creates a kind of internal parallax. What we are not yet in motion toward appears fixed, elevated, and separate from us. Move toward it, and the illusion begins to collapse.

First, then, let’s set the benchmark. They are not doing anything otherworldly or miraculous. They are behaving as fully expressed human beings, doing what humans can do, being what humans can be. That is the point. Even through extreme trauma, difficulty, or lifelong suffering, we can heal, adapt, and overcome. We can live fully into whatever limits, upper or lower, we set for ourselves.

We learn early on what is “possible,” and it is usually wrong, even if it is useful. It is limited, distorted, or dysfunctional, yet often serves a purpose for a time. These are borrowed beliefs, adopted without ever truly scrutinizing or questioning them. So we seek the advice and guidance of others to tell us what to do, what’s possible, how to cope, how to get along, how to manage our symptoms, limitations, perceived lack, or brokenness. And yet, regardless of the framework, every human being is born capable of what these stories represent. When we label it amazing, remarkable, extraordinary, magical, or superhuman, we place ourselves in a lesser position. We quietly step back from something that was never separate from us. The hierarchy exists only in our imagination.

We all have to contend with the paradox of the human experience and the many conflicting, contrasting, divisive, and fractious elements of life. It’s no picnic, especially in the era in which we now find ourselves. Some may appear to have it far better or easier than others, but we rarely see the whole story or the full picture.

All that being said, the intention here is not to discount or disparage those who have overcome tremendously painful, traumatic, or dangerous circumstances, but to expand the paradigm. They are examples of what should be recognized as the standard, the default field of human potential, not the exception. There are far too many ways in which we defer agency, autonomy, and the full range of abilities we are born with. Science may call these moments anomalies or coincidences, attempting to fit everything into incomplete models. Religion may attribute them to something beyond us, placing emphasis on prayer, faith, or divine intervention. In different ways, both can remove us from the equation and place us inside a framework of limitation.

In its simplest form, the difference between most of humanity and those who achieve the extraordinary is a clear and defined aim. They know, with conviction, what they want to be or do, even when the world around them insists it is impossible, even in the face of ridicule from peers or family, narrow or misguided diagnoses, and perhaps especially when no one has ever done it before.

No one comes back from ____.
You’ll have to find a new career or vocation because ____.
That’s just not an option anymore.
Get real.

Or maybe none of that was ever true.

Maybe no one was ever meant to stay within those lines, except by agreement, repetition, and quiet resignation. Maybe what we call limitation is often just distance left unchallenged, reinforced over time until it feels fixed, immovable, and final.

But distance is not difference. What appears far away, unreachable, or reserved for the few does not belong to another class of human being. It only appears that way from where we stand, shaped by what we’ve accepted, what we’ve been told, and what we’ve repeated to ourselves often enough to believe.

And maybe the only real difference is this: some people move toward what calls them, despite everything that insists they shouldn’t, and in doing so, discover there was never anything separating them from it in the first place. Not something given. Not something granted. Something lived into.

The world outside us is ready and waiting to criticize, to form opinions, to judge, anticipate, or support. It loves the underdog and, just as quickly, cuts down the tall poppy, unless that person is deemed “extraordinary” and therefore separate from the rest of us, no longer simply human, no longer part of the same struggle.

That, too, is nonsense.

Admire and respect their achievements. Remember, they are made of the same stuff as you. Humans need resistance, something to push against, and challenges that teach them how to pull themselves up and out of the many circumstances that will inevitably arise along the road. Rapid growth often comes to those who have had to contend with and reconcile the worst of it. That experience sets the tone, the theme, and shapes the ultimate goal, while also opening a world of skills and abilities that must be learned and developed to achieve it. It falls to each of us to discern what it means to be ourselves, which limits we accept or reject, how we respond when challenges arise, and how we choose to use the limited time we are given in this life.

Solvitur ambulando