What’s “Impossible”?

A few days ago, I had an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with a friend who “refused to believe” (his words) that some­one could walk over red hot fire coals unharmed. “Prove to me that it is pos­si­ble!” he said. The fact that I have seen peo­ple fire­walk­ing unharmed thou­sands of time, was not a proof. “It is impossible”.

So what is “impos­si­ble” really?

Over 2000 years ago, the philoso­pher Zeno of Greece proved math­e­mat­i­cally that it is impos­si­ble to cross a river. The argu­ment was as fol­low: “the dis­tance between one bank of the river and the other is made of an infi­nite amount of points. It takes an infi­nite amount of time to cross an infi­nite amount of points. There­fore it is impos­si­ble to cross a river” (I guess most of you didn’t know that it is impos­si­ble to cross a river, did you?)

We had to wait 2000 years and the advent of Cal­cu­lus to show math­e­mat­i­cally that an infi­nite amount of points can be crossed in a finite amount of time. Sud­denly, in a split sec­ond, the impos­si­ble became pos­si­ble (phew!)

Pro­fes­sor Stephen Hawk­ing, the father of sev­eral key sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies in the field of cos­mol­ogy and physics said: “It does not mean it is impos­si­ble. Only that our under­stand­ing is incom­plete”.

Con­clu­sion 1 is a ques­tion: How can I trans­late this in my life?

Con­clu­sion 2: As Paul Wat­zlaw­ick used to say, emo­tional health comes from growth, not healing.

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