The Impossible Thing
I’ll admit it. I have no idea what I’m doing. I usually have a plan, a 12-week blogging outline, a path that I’m leading my readers on. But literally as I am writing this, the distance learning interruptions are coming fast and furious, the dog is monitoring the front window so she can bark every time anyone walks by, and I’m struggling with my own self-doubt about whether or not I can keep all the balls in the air. I already dropped the one about submitting the second online form about picking up library books from the school this week. I thought the first form I filled out was enough, but alas. No library books for my poor children who only have three bookshelves full to choose from.
All of that to say, I don’t know what to write today. Except that if you’re in this same place as me, this place where there are few wins and too many struggles…welcome. You’re in good company. This is hard.
But the nice thing about having no idea what I’m doing is that I haven’t learned what is impossible yet. I just finished my second manuscript, this one for a fluffy, fun fiction. I’m getting ready to submit it to agents, which I hear will involve a lot of rejection. One of the few people I’ve talked to about this made sure to let me know how impossible it was, how it won’t work for me, how no one really gets a book published.
Maybe they’re right. But I don’t know that for sure yet. And life around here is already so messy, so humbling, so terribly non-ideal, that I keep asking myself, “Why shouldn’t I try? What could adding a few (or a hundred) rejections really change?” I’ve been rejected before and somehow my family and friends still love me.
What is your thing? The thing that you don’t know is impossible yet? Why not try? Maybe there’s good reasons - you’re overworked as it is, or you don’t have the money to pursue that dream yet, or you just don’t have it in you to take on another struggle. Makes sense to me. But maybe today, consider mulling over the impossible thing in your mind. Maybe as you think through it, the path will become a little more clear. The fog will lift for just a moment and you’ll see that your impossible thing is not as far away as you thought. Or you’ll see another path towards that goal, one you hadn’t noticed yet.
Even as I write these words, they sound fluffy. What is an impossible goal compared to the very urgent needs around me right now? (And I wish I could share with you a photo of the sheer number of living beings surrounding me and a recording of the noise of three simultaneous zoom calls and various online learning platforms.) Those demands are real and great. But they are not the sum total of my life. I can offer ten minutes to my impossible thing.
Even if you’re interrupted every thirty seconds.
What is your impossible thing?
