As someone who works a great deal with amazing athletes who are trying and achieving the impossible, I realize that ‘faith’ is sometimes more important than what we perceive as ‘fact’.
If we accept the notion that something is impossible, or unrealistic, we sabotage inspiration and innovation. If we knew things could not, would not happen no matter what, then we wouldn’t ever try, and there are a lot of things through the ages that one could point to as absolutely impossible, which later turned out to be more than possible.
Take a few simple examples in our time:
Next time you are sitting in your aisle seat on flight 134X to somewhere, ask yourself if the concept of a several thousand tone metal tube hurtling through the air at over 500 miles an hour (yes you read that right, 7–8 x’s faster than you’ll be driving to work tomorrow!) would actually have been possible in the mind of someone riding their buggy to work back in the 1800’s?
The concept of driving the car would have seemed impossible, let alone being up in the air at some ridiculous speed enjoying the fine taste of free pretzels!
As Henry Ford was once purported to say, ‘If I’d listened to what people wanted, I would have found faster horses!’ or something to that effect.
Taken another step forward, President Kennedy had the seemingly impossible vision of putting a man on the moon.
Think about that one for a second!
There are still some cynics who believe it never happened, probably because the concept of believing that we actually were able to build a rocket ship powerful enough and intelligent enough to carry men all the way to the moon and back (477,800 miles round trip, which is 7350 hours driving time if you were driving your car at the speed limit of 65 mph, or 306 days of driving!) really does seem impossible still today.
Finally, that smart phone on which you might be reading this post would have seemed impossible to me as a little boy, who was still picking up and dialing the phone number of a friend, unable to move further from that phone than the cord allowed, and unable to leave a message to the person I was calling.
Imagine?!
If no one answered…….no one answered! Crazy huh? No message service, no text message, just empty ringing.
And now, on a phone with more intellectual capacity than the actual space craft that went to the moon, we can receive a phone call from a friend and actually see them in real time, while they are flying in a plane over the Atlantic ocean, hurtling at 500 plus miles an hour.
Possible or impossible?
So the next time you think that Santa Clause doesn’t exist, maybe, just maybe you need to open your eyes to the possibility that the wonder in a child’s face is because they know something we don’t. They know that faith overcomes impossibility, maybe not every time, but a whole lot of the time!
Originally published at medium.com