by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: June 24, 2009   Last Updated: May 19, 2011

Advice is something which will often be given for free, without it having been sought. Unfortunately, advice will not always be of a type we wish to hear and we can frequently feel worse in some way after receiving it than we did before. This may be especially true where we know the giver of the advice to be correct but, for our own personal reasons, we do not wish to take heed of their words.

Occasionally, however, we are given a piece of advice which is so profound, it is likely to live on within us for a very long time. Advice of this type is likely to relate to a general philosophy or concept, perhaps vague on the face of it but so deep in substance that we can relate to it in a wealth of unrelated circumstances. I was about seven or eight years old when I was given such a piece of philosophical advice. I have remembered and frequently considered the simple words ever since and I have also shared them with a great many other people.

There was a wise and friendly old man lived over the fence from me at the time, for whom I had a great deal of fondness and respect. I remember on the day in question telling this neighbor that something was impossible. I don’t recall to what I was referring but I vividly recall the essence of his response. He told me in simple terms that there is no such thing as impossible, there are only varying degrees of difficulty, and that if I were to make the most of my life, I should always remember and live by that principal.

This philosophy may at first seem preposterous and illogical. All of us can immediately think of ten things and more which we and others would deem to be impossible. It is only when we look at the concept in a little more depth that we can truly see its value. How often was it deemed impossible that the world could be round, that man could fly, that man could walk on the moon? Where would mankind be today if men like Christopher Columbus and the Wright brothers had accepted these notions as gospel and failed to challenge the abject negativity? What if these explorers and experimental scientists had never made their discoveries or produced their inventions?

The lesson that each of us can learn from this simple philosophy is that just because we don’t know how to achieve something, or build something, with our present level of individual or collective knowledge, it does not necessarily follow that it is impossible. Where there is a will, there is a way, is a related philosophy and striving to achieve the apparently impossible is what has both created the world in which we live and that which gives us the greatest hope of creating a better world for tomorrow.

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