POSSIBILITIES ARE NOT IN THINGS, BUT IN US

I was listening to Arnold Schwarzenegger's speech on YouTube. It was delightful, speaking to an audience dominated by youths and using his life experiences as a tool for inspiration. I could hear sweet, sweet screams when he made statements that resonated with their reality. I smiled from my end and scoffed in awe of the different processes he embraced on his way to greatness.

I was soaked in the rain of his eloquence, authority, and use of words as he indirectly proposed principles that helped him. But I wasn’t carried away by the flood of his success testimonies; I rather laid hold on utterances that came from his subtly told principles. A quote stayed with me after seeing the video, and I am holding on to it religiously. It was a statement made by former South African president and activist Nelson Mandela:

“Anything is impossible until somebody does it.”

There is a stage, or phase, you journey through, or an experience you have in life that will make you confess possibility in all things, depending on your life purpose, pursuits, values, and beliefs. It will be valid and candid of you to reflect on whatever you call impossible. Impossibility and possibility have a lot to do with our knowledge, the degree of our resilience in grinding out our convictions, and how we choose to handle failure.

The power of ideas, the role of man

Anything is possible, good or bad. Possibility is independent of how good or evil an idea is; it depends on who carries the idea. A sincere inspection of societal ills that have consumed and confused our nation and the world reveals that they started as ideas.

These ideas prospered simply because every evil and good idea follows the same working principles once consistently applied. Corruption, wars, terrorism, murder, racism, and rape all started as ideas. They prospered because their progenitors were ardent believers in the “anything is possible” slogan.

Also, most inventions, innovations, and initiatives that have caused global transformations started as ideas. They had their own uncertainties and challenges, which made them seem impossible at some point. Every one of their success stories has its hill and valley moments. They understood the language of failure and the beat of defeat.

Nevertheless, they had a deep conviction in the power of possibility, even when discouraged, and they stayed until their ideas became reality.

Man: the carrier of possibilities

Undisputably, ideas are the children of man's thoughts. No matter how life-changing an idea can be, it can't become a reality — it needs a man. Possibility doesn't live in things. It doesn't live in ideas. It lives in man.

Man has been given the gift of being the carrier of possibilities, not things. People will always precede process and product. We now understand that impossibility and possibility are dependent on the consistency of our knowledge, the degree of our resilience, and how we choose to handle failure.

Let this mind be in you: that possibilities are not first in things or ideas, but in man.

Though ideas can live beyond their owners, they cannot become a reality without their breath.

Wake up!