Limits: A Mathematical Analysis of Personal Growth

Time has an ability to differentiate changes within an individual. Time isn’t biased, because its duty of precise measurement of physical moments is synonymous to everyone who obeys its progression. We, as a body, have the option to make decisions, to think analytically, to carry out a certain action and to retract the latter, all within a matter of seconds.

Time is indefinitely continuous, and because existence is defined by time, existence is therefore also defined by its ability to progress.

Have you progressed? Are you the same person you were five minutes, five months, or five years ago? Analytically speaking, its impossible to physically remain the same if one is parallel with time, but from a social standpoint, these are the questions that need to be asked when looking into growth and personal development. What can you partake in this very moment, that’ll place you in a completely different box, compared to the one you were originally in? What new thoughts can you formulate, that’ll remove the unconscious bias you had lurking around? What new ideas can you communicate, that’ll arrange and change the people around you?

I think its fair to say that I am not perfect; we are all far from it. However, our participation in experiences, and our reactions and reflections from those experiences, could possibly push us towards perfection.

I stand by this hypothesis.

I consider myself a “personified”-type thinker; I tend to mesh and connect un-similar ideas together to gain sense of things in a better limelight, or to re-vamp an old though in order to have a more organic viewpoint. When I think of (secularized) perfection (because, quite frankly, because of my religious stance, pure perfection is non-existent in worldly form), I think of limits. Mathematical limits, to be exact. Before I dive into the topic of growth, I would like to send a quick refresher on limits. The refresher is mainly for my sake, because by no means am I a mathematician.

A limit can best be defined as “the value that a function or sequence ‘approaches’ as the input or index approaches some value”.

An interval must be properly defined. If I were to bring this back to my original point of time defining existence, I would define the interval of this particular limit (a) as infinity, since time is defined as being indefinitely continuous (i.e. time, as of now in this day and age, does not have a finite limit). A variable, x, must also be defined. “X” is me, whoever is reading this, and whoever/whatever claims to be of existence.

Lastly, “L” is the limit itself. I will personally define “L” as being 0: the number 0 is significant, because 0 is generally the absence of a certain quantity. In this case, 0 is the absence of imperfection (or in plain terms, the presence of perfection). Now, let’s take a quick look at an example, using this same methodology:

As “X” approaches the interval of infinity, the limit (L) of this function is zero (0). Notice: the function never actually reaches 0, because, as a reiteration, 0 is the limit; it does get extremely close to the limit, however. The remaining amount for x to reach the 0 limit is an infinite amount of infinities, but that numerical amount of infinities is less than the amount of infinities present as the function was originally approaching the limit of 0.

So, what is the basis of this explanation?

As students, educators, community leaders, family members, and others alike, we partake in verbal conversations, physical activities, and mental mark-ups that can either push us near our limit, or have us at a standstill. Remember: we are defined by time (our “infinity”) and time is the movement of progression, so evidently, we (x) are defined by our progress.

Our progression is advanced (or halted) by who we talk to and connect with, what we read, what we feast our eyes on, what we choose to listen to, and what we ponder on. Believe it or not, but every decision we make pertaining to our progression has a lasting effect: the food we intake, the music we download onto our iPhones, the amount of hours we work, the people we marry, the pictures we “like” on Instagram; every action, every thought, every word, feeds into our mathematical limit.

How will you aim to reach your limit?