It seems to be our mutual fate to be living during a time of great upheaval and sweeping crisis. The glue that once held our society together is dissolving. Many of us are stranded, trying to fathom what our lives mean after all the difficulties we have gone through. We are left standing in the rubble after a hurricane or trying to pick up the pieces after a divorce. We are not able to control the forces or people that cause suffering, but we can determine what the pain and suffering do to us and what we become because of it. The answers are within us, not outside of us, and those answers will give us insight into what’s next for us and give us the hope to go on.

All shamans, mystics, Buddha, yogis and saints have said the same thing: answers to our questions come from looking within and in our stillness we find hope.

But hope is just a starting point. It’s where we dialog with the Muses and wonder about what could be and what if. Hope is a magical ingredient that stirs up and animates the impossible in our lives.

Developing a relationship with the impossible requires effort and energy. Once connected to the impossible, an emotional and psychic bond is formed with that reality. It’s like any meaningful personal relationship; it’s intimate and alive, and nourishing to your inner senses. A dialogue between you and the impossible is the merging of a unique vision and it is the same thing as having a download of grace rush through your system. In an instant, it penetrates into your intellect, your emotions, your mind and your vocabulary. This new symbolic content shifts your understanding of the cosmos. You can feel the power of the impossible take hold of you as it runs through your blood like a new drug, making it’s way to your neurology. The download is complete and it’s yours and you are on a high that is unexplainable to anyone who has never been swept away by the thrill of contact with the realm of the impossible. This is a love affair unlike anything on earth because it isn’t of the earth. But soon it will be – that becomes the task, as you are the vessel for the impossible. But as this container, you need to be someone who can handle being misunderstood or be able to keep your own company because others cannot see or comprehend the impossible. You need to be strong enough to believe something only you can see or understand – for a long, long time. Most people cannot stand alone in the demanding realm of the impossible. So, they live in the lesser world of fantasies and musings and unfulfilled hopeful wishes. And that is the hard truth of life.

Understand that you form a working relationship to the impossible, and just wishing and hoping is not enough. You have to act. You have to bring forth the impossible and give it life. The impossible requires vigilance and dedicated attention and constant courageous choices as well as a willingness to allow your life to change in impossible directions. People continually approach life with habitual attitudes while expecting outcomes to be different. Changing your relationship to the impossible means awakening to some other way of being. Not simply doing things differently, but becoming a different person, both more aware and more alert in life. Such an individual awakening doesn’t just happen; an immersion of sorts is required as well as a genuine reflection that allows the possibility of the impossible to rise to the surface. The baptism takes place under the water and no one actually sees the change that occurs.

There are the subtleties and surprises on any path and only after traveling far can we hear and understand. At the far end of our waking and walking, of our worrying and working, when we realize that there are no shortcuts, it is in the willingness to surrender that allows the pilgrimage to the self to being and the willingness to be vulnerable that allows the impossible to be reached. The impossible happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before. It’s the man who opts not to invite his abusive mother to his wedding; the woman who decides to spend her Saturday mornings in a drawing class instead of scrubbing toilets at home; the parent who takes a deep breath instead of throwing a plate. The impossible is there. It’s our task. Doing the impossible will give us clarity and strength. It will bring us closer to whom we hope to be.

Developing a relationship to the impossible kicked my butt five ways from Sunday. But when the troubles get deep enough, when the problems become greater than us, when the weight of the world is on our shoulders, the impossible can offer more ways to proceed that the more narrow paths of logic and reason. For there is thought in the heart and it is connected to the deeper power of humanity, the power of the impossible.