“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” (~Nelson Mandela)

“Never give up on something that you can’t go a day without thinking about.” (~Winston Churchill)

“Impossible only means that you haven’t found the solution yet.” (~Anonymous)

“Every noble work is at first impossible.” (~Thomas Carlyle)

Much as I love them, even inspiring words like these can be thin comfort when you’re really struggling to keep on keeping on. It’s hard to hang in there when the going gets tough, and even the most beautiful prose can’t twist a strong enough rope to hold you up when you feel like you’re going down.

Sometimes the only thing you can do to keep afloat is to keep on bailing the water that keeps on threatening to sink you.

Just keep on keeping on.

Yeah, maybe keep on remembering that fable about that one particularly dogged Testudinidae, and just stay steady.

Hindsight being all 20/20, the quotes above are like most of the others you find about doing the impossible. Meaning, they’ve all been said by folks who’ve already done the impossible. Okay, maybe not the anonymous one. But then again, there are probably a lot of people who are quite anonymous to most of the rest of us who actually have done the impossible.

I’m thinking a lot of those people were mothers.

But you mostly never hear from people who haven’t succeeded in achieving their own impossible dream. Maybe they gave up and so failed. Or maybe they didn’t give up at all. Maybe they kept on trying right up to the end, and still never succeeded in accomplishing their own personal mission-impossible. Who knows?

And really, who cares? Is success defined as having achieved some thing, or as having tried in the first place? Is it success to have your name known far and wide (or at least on one of the first few pages of a Google search), or to know that you gave your best to what you thought was the best use of your time and energy and life?

Is it possible that success is nothing more than a life lived in pursuit of something bigger than you, something impossible, whether or not you actually accomplish that impossible thing?

Maybe the most impossible thing of all is to hang on to hope when it seems hopeless. Maybe hope is the strongest cord of all, the only one that can really bear the weight of us.

Maybe the most noble work of all is to hang on to hope when it looks sort of hopeless.

Because hope is what keeps us from giving up, keeps us searching for solutions, keeps us keeping on.

Maybe hope is really what makes the impossible possible.

~xo,
LuAnne