impossible until it’s not

This was in my fortune cookie the other night.

The hard things keep coming, don’t they? Sometimes I stare at the calendar and think, There is no way I will make it to May. There is no way I will make it through next week. I am so quick to jump ahead to all the things in the universe I can’t imagine shouldering right now. If we got a bill for x amount of dollars, I could not pay it. If I had to turn in my dissertation prospectus tomorrow, I wouldn’t be ready. If a giant robot took over Columbus and forced all humans underground, I wouldn’t have enough bottled water to keep us alive.

I am learning to trust. It’s slow but I’m learning. I try to think back to the all the impossible things I’ve done. Passing my candidacy exam felt impossible. It felt huge, insurmountable. But I did it. Step by step. It’s not as if one minute I was a PhD student and the next I was a PhD candidate. It was night after day after night of reading. It was one exam day at a time, one sentence at a time, one question at a time, one book at a time. It was impossible…until the moment it wasn’t.

I am struggling not to leap ahead to the next impossible thing I can’t imagine overcoming. Some days, I feel scared out of my  mind by how much feels impossible. But that is not how we are supposed to live. That is not how I want to live. 

Things are only impossible…until they are not.

love, elizabeth