Beyond Limits: Overcoming Impossible

Shel Silverstein was my first favorite poet, and is probably the reason I fell so deeply in love with the magic of words. But this quote is so much more than a snippet from a poem - it's an incredible wisdom, if only we take the time to look between the words for the magic they hold. So often, our thought processes lean toward the negative, especially when it comes to the big things in our lives. The uphill battles, the trials we don't feel ready for, the tasks we feel unequipped to accomplish. We get stuck in the words we've heard...the "mustn'ts," the "don'ts," the "shouldn'ts," "impossibles," and "won'ts." We listen to the "never haves," and we let them dictate the course of our decisions because we're afraid to go another way.

I spent the better part of my young life listening to that negative narrative, not because I wanted to but because it was drilled into my mind through every possible avenue - and it's true, what they say about young minds being sponges. I soaked it all up.

I'm typically a rule-follower. I try to keep my head down, my nose clean, and my mouth shut. I try not to get myself into trouble (though to be honest, I fail at that often enough). Mostly, I don't rock the boat.

Except for when I do. In my family, I was always the one who wouldn't seek out a conflict, but wouldn't back down from one either. I don't break rules unless I feel like I've got a good reason to. But in those spaces, the spaces where I had no choice but to step out of my comfort zone and go another way, I've learned so much about life and the value of balance (and boundaries). The hard lessons I've learned from ignoring the "mustn'ts" and the "don'ts" have lead to risks that felt like adventures and leaps of faith that taught me to fly - and those moments caught on the edge of the in-between helped me foster a certain respect for who I am, despite where I came from.

I grew up in a fairly poor, horrifyingly dysfunctional small town family; there were a lot of things I "shouldn't" say or "mustn't" do, and I carried a long list of poverty and abuse-induced "impossibles" through the early parts of my life. Those barriers of adversity created a long list of "never haves," some of which I've come to regret, and others I've come to be proud of.

One thing I can't live with is a list of "won'ts." I refuse to hold a negative perspective, because even the worst parts of life carry lessons that help us to grow and learn and develop - and when we share those lessons, we open the opportunity for others to learn, because as Shel Silverstein says, "anything can happen, child. Anything can be."

It's this bit of encouragement that gave me hope when I decided as an elementary school student that one day, I would be an author. This determined promise of possibility kept my fingers on the keyboard (or the pen) through dozens of unfinished stories, hundreds of heartrending poems. The lingering taste of the hope offered in these words fueled the insanity of excitement that filled me as I clicked "publish" for the first time in December, 2012. It's that same hope that brought me back to writing, even when spending such a long time away made coming back feel like yet another "impossible."

We're about thirty-nine-and-a-half weeks away from the (expanded second-edition) re-release of FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, and I'm nearly two thirds of the way through writing the brand new and much-awaited sequel, STILL FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM.

I'm still grieving...writing without Chance snoring next to me just isn't the same. I'm still slowly turning my oldest daughter's bedroom into an office space I can feel comfortable and creative in. I'm still cooking the dinners and cleaning the house and showing up for my students at church.

But the stories still nag at me whenever I'm not telling them. My fingers still itch for the keyboard when I'm forced to walk away and live my life. I'm still adding notes to an ever-thickening notebook of story ideas.

Making a real living with this writing thing still looks impossible sometimes, a far-off goal I may never see come to fruition. But to be honest, I'm never as happy as I am when I'm sculpting words into stories, never as fulfilled as I am when I'm painting images for the minds of readers.

So with that, I hope to leave you this week with a reminder: keep an eye on the updates in the sidebar, because who cares about "impossible," anyway? Life will knock us around whenever it wants to - and we can still choose to...