No Limits

Have you ever felt like society tries to control you by telling you to live within a set of parameters made of the expectations of people you don't know and probably wouldn't like even if you did know?

The whole idea of living within limits defined by other people's expectations is as distasteful as trying to chug sour milk. Expecting people to live within the law is good and reasonable, but expecting people to walk and talk, dress and conduct themselves a certain way is an attempt to fit them with a harness so they can pull around your expectations like they're an ox pulling a plow.

My experience with living large despite being told I would have a very limited life, even if I came out of my coma, started when I first became conscious of my surroundings. I remember days going by before the the hospital's chief neuron surgeon responded to my request for him to come to my room.

The surgeon was one of the few people who could understand me even if I didn't point of letters on my alphabet board.

"How soon will I be able to get out of this bed and this hospital," I asked.


"Al," he replied softly. "You'll never be able to walk or talk understandably or drive again."


What! I'm a 19 year old roofer. I have to walk, I have to talk, I have to drive!
Frantically I threw my bedclothes off me, pushed my paralyzed leg off the bed with my other weakened leg and tried to stand up. I fell on my face. Two nurses and a doctor helped me back in bed, but as soon as they turned around I climbed back out and fell again. This time, they put me back in bed and strapped me in.


As I lay strapped to the bed, staring at the ceiling and contemplating my grim future, I was momentarily too stunned and horrified to have anything remotely resembling a coherant thought, but looking back I can see how this was when I began developing the willingness to live outside the box. Actually, living outside the box of people's expectations wasn't as much a choice as it was a survival skill. Living outside the box is living outside the expectations of narrow minded people who think they know the end from the beginning. Living outside expectations is living without limits. Hence my book, No Limits.