“Americans… resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives. Our national myth is about the endless defiance of limits: opening the western frontier, breaking the speed of sound, dropping people on the moon, discovering ‘cyberspace’ at the very moment when we have filled old-fashioned space with so much junk that we can barely move. We refuse to take no for an answer.
“Despite the American myth, I cannot be or do whatever I desire… there are some roles and relationships in which we thrive and others in which we wither and die.
“If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I am exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship — and may end up doing more damage than if I had never set out to do this particular ‘good’.”
-Parker Palmer (Let Your Life Speak, p.42-46)