Edward Burne-Jones: The Land of Beulah (1881)

"…when there are perfectly satisfying wishes lurking much closer and more convenient to home…"

In EndDays, apparent limits shift. What might once have been measured in ‘sky’ seems not nearly as impressive or high. More modest boundaries apply. I might ascribe this narrower sense to the usual limits imposed by age and experience. I’ve learned to moderate my possibility senses in anticipation of not being able to fully satisfy them. This might seem like a dandy adaptation to prevent discouragement or depression, but it also materially affects my sense of possibility. If I give up on myself without much in the way of challenging, it seems I must be prelimiting my influence. Those who cannot imagine might struggle to manifest. Back when the sky served as TheLimit, I felt much less restrained than I do entering my waiting dotage, where I hold the benefit of so much more experience manifesting even impossibilities. I feel forced to admit that I’ve been limiting myself.

I remember consulting with a group in a company that had just been acquired in a buyout. Everyone would either be invited to relocate to Texas from Massachusetts or be laid off. Their company’s fate was not in question. Each seemed not quite ready to forfeit their relationship with their company. They understandably dwelled upon what they would be losing. Few felt drawn to living in Texas, and no one in any way wanted the alternative. Damned whatever they might do, they grieved. There were, of course, still an infinite number of other alternatives, any of which might ultimately prove superior to their apparent double-boundedness, but nobody seemed to have access to whatever those alternatives might be. Their limits had been reset, rendering them stuck. We engaged in a few exercises intended to open previously unexplored possibilities until a fresh sense of potential began to take over. They realized that until their fate actually appeared, they were temporarily free to do whatever they cared to do. They had been suffocating on their unseen new freedom.

And EndDays bring just such suffocation at first. My response might naturally default to ever greater limits, for I feel as though I’m losing my future. If these are, indeed, my EndDays, I can’t presume that my todays will continue to extend ad infinitum, as I have always assumed in the past. My morning suddenly and disquietingly becomes a more precious commodity, rare and only growing rarer still, rather than extending toward and into infinity. Something, then, must be concomitant on me in this second, something, perhaps, other than deliberately limiting my potential. If these are the EndDays, this morning must be worth multiples of whatever I had valued my old, now ordinary, merely infinite mornings. What might well now be severely limited in numbers need not necessarily be limited in worth. Potential intrudes on many simultaneous levels.

The sky, though, that old ‘sky’s the limit’ sky, doesn’t seem to stretch nearly as high as before. My limits might still reach clear up to the sky, but the sky seems much lower, much closer now. To maintain my historical loft, I’d need to reach much higher than just the sky. To say the sky’s the limit now seems to radically limit my potential, for Chicken Little might have been right. The sky was falling. The public focus upon acquiring mammon, that great demeaning Making America Great Again movement, seems to have caused my once limitless-seeming sky to have fallen. I wear my clouds around my ears. My vision suddenly seems obscured by what once seemed like lofty clouds, now reduced to mere fog. My vision’s visibility sure seems severely limited, and TheLimit, that universal indicator of lofty greatness, suddenly seems little more than shoulder high.

Maybe I’m freer than I’ve ever been before. Liberated from my presumptions of the infinite, I hold opportunities to spend my seconds as if they were precious. Why do I need the sky when even the microscopic suddenly seems to hold the wealth of kings? Maybe we no longer require vast empires to achieve great wealth. Maybe loft and reach were always overrated, stand-ins for attributes far better suited to who we always were. Maybe a microscopic vision can be a worthy replacement for something traditionally much more massive. Maybe The Sky’s The Limit was, by nature, invasive, distracting attention too far away from an even better home. Who needs to wish upon a star when there are perfectly satisfying wishes lurking much closer and more convenient to home?

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz