Who Taught Us Impossible?

I sometimes wonder when we learned impossibility.

Not when we discovered that some things were difficult. Not when we understood that life has limitations.

But when did we begin to look at something we wanted to do and convince ourselves that it could not be done?

I thought about this recently while watching someone struggle to ride a bicycle.

It reminded me of something almost embarrassing about myself: I still cannot ride a bicycle.

Not a motorcycle. A bicycle.

I have watched children ride them. Young men ride them. Old men ride them. People ride them for fun, for sport, for exercise, for almost everything.

And somehow, I still cannot.

The funny thing is, I have always wanted to.

I have even imagined myself riding a power bike one day. Yet riding a bicycle has remained one of those simple things I have never figured out.

And I honestly don’t know why.

But watching this person struggle made me think.

Maybe riding a bicycle is a lot like life.

You know you can move forward, but you have to find your balance while moving. You wobble. You lose your balance. You fall. You get back up.

But what happens when the fear of falling becomes greater than the desire to move?

What if I fall?
What if I hurt myself?
What if I break my leg?
What if I embarrass myself?

Suddenly, the person is no longer struggling with the bicycle alone.

He is struggling with everything he has imagined could go wrong.

That thought took me somewhere else.

I started thinking about children and the strange things we were capable of imagining.

How many things did we create when we were young simply because we could imagine them?

A carton became a car..

A bottle top became a wheel.

A piece of paper became a canoe.

A stick could become a gun, a sword, a microphone or whatever our imagination required it to be.

We could build an entire world out of almost nothing.

We did not stop to ask whether it made sense.

We did not ask whether anyone had done it before.

We simply saw a possibility.

And that is one of the most fascinating things about the human mind:

possibility seems to come naturally to us.

Impossibility, on the other hand, seems to be something we learn.

We grow.

We fail.

We get rejected.

We hear, “You can’t.”

We discover money, consequences, limitations, expectations and fear.

We watch other people try and fail, and sometimes their failure becomes a reason for us not to try at all.

Slowly, almost without noticing, we begin to edit our imagination.

The child who once asked, “Why can’t I?” becomes the adult who says, “That’s not possible.”

The child who could turn a carton into a car becomes the adult who looks at an idea and first thinks about all the reasons it will not work.

But here is the part I find interesting.

I am still a strong believer in possibility.

I genuinely believe there is so much more that can be done than we allow ourselves to imagine. I believe that the fact that something has never been done does not mean it cannot be done.

So the bicycle still bothers me.

Because I believe in possibility, yet there is this very simple thing I have somehow convinced myself I cannot do.

Why?

I still don’t know.

Maybe it is fear.

Maybe I never had the right person to teach me.

Maybe because I tried once, failed, and never tried seriously again.

Or maybe there is no deep explanation at all.

But the question remains.

How many things in our lives have we quietly labelled “I can’t” without ever investigating why?

How many dreams have we abandoned without actually discovering whether they were impossible?

How many times have we mistaken unfamiliar for impossible?

Growing up does not necessarily take our imagination away.

It gives us experiences that can make us doubt it.

And that is why there is something valuable about becoming childlike again, not childish, but childlike.

To wonder again.

To imagine without immediately interrogating the possibility.

To look at something unfamiliar without deciding that it cannot be done.

To fall without turning the fall into a definition of who we are.

The child who built a car from a carton was not foolish.

He simply had not learned all the reasons why the car could not be real.

We do not need to lose the wisdom adulthood gives us.

We only need to make room for the imagination we had before fear became so good at interrupting it.

That is where the bicycle becomes more than a bicycle.

Sometimes, life puts something in front of us and all we can see is the possibility.

Then we start thinking about the fall.

The more we think about the fall, the less willing we become to move.

Until eventually, we are standing beside the very thing we once wanted, explaining to ourselves why we cannot have it.