A few weeks back before I embarked on the next leg of my journey to New Zealand, I came across a man who happened to be at one of the mandirs I was visiting. Niceties over, I explained that I had taken a year out of my life to do vistaar. As is the case with many people, such terminology is somewhat alien to one’s vocabulary, so some explanation as to what I was doing with my life ensued. In the last three months, I’ve given largely the same explanation to many different persons and the reaction is predictable to say the least. A nod of the head, a smile and the words “very good” being muttered has been the general norm so far but this was soon to change...
Without going into too much detail the common reoccurrence of one word in particular summed up our conversation perfectly – impossible. Supposedly, what I was trying to achieve together with our organisation was in a nutshell completely and utterly inconceivable. Now, I’ll be the first one to admit that organising the society for the better is no easy job! I mean look around us. How can we a group of individuals, organise the society to such an extent that we are not constantly at logger heads with each other? Soldiers in Afghanistan losing their lives, innocent civilians caught up in warfare in the middle east and the constant reminder of children dying from disease and hunger. This is just today. On the surface that one word answer is quite fitting but if our mentality is such then we might as well stamp that answer on our foreheads and create a fuss over nothing.
If you told me that Lance Armstrong would win the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times after having survived testicular cancer, I would have said impossible. If, twenty years ago, you would have told me that Apple computers would begin to surpass Windows, I would have said impossible. If someone had told me that a single man going by the name Mohandas Karmachand Gandhi would lead India away from despair, I would have said impossible. Yet impossible is possible. David Blaine, the high profile American endurance artist once said that ‘in truth, the only restriction on our capacity to astonish ourselves and eachother are imposed by our minds.’ This coming from a man who many of us deem crazy but what we fail to realise is that through his actions and his stunts he makes a mockery of the word impossible.
Let this be a lesson to us all. Our lives have impossible written all over them in every sphere, in every dimension. The world will tell us we can’t do what we want to do, we can’t become what we want to become but the defining moments boil down to you, no one else...
