Impossible Fun

Life is more fun if you are involved in the impos­si­ble. I dis­cov­ered that many years ago and have been at it ever since. If you can accom­plish your daily goals, you are even­tu­ally going to be bored to death. I take on too many projects and push for too many accom­plish­ments. The fun of life is in defy­ing its lim­i­ta­tions. Dare the clock to beat you to the punch! Pit your­self against impos­si­ble odds and see if it does not bring a smile to your face. Note how your mind can do sev­eral things at once when it has to.

Why do peo­ple risk their lives in such silly pur­suits as climb­ing Mt. Ever­est? They climb past the frozen bod­ies of those that have made the same attempt and failed (there is no way to remove the bod­ies with­out adding to the body count). I think I know why: We were designed to pur­sue beyond our phys­i­cal abil­i­ties in order to find our souls. A poor car­pen­ter takes on the task of shift­ing the men­tal­ity of the entire world by rais­ing the reli­gious bar and oppos­ing all of the con­trol­ling forces of his day. He goes to his death in defi­ance of infe­rior prin­ci­ples but on behalf of those that mind­lessly sup­port them. By doing so, he found and expressed ulti­mate mean­ing and was not left to the fate of the last impos­si­bil­ity — death itself.

I am unable to live up to my own stan­dards. By choice I have taken on a call­ing that is not as pop­u­lar as it once was, and it is down­right dis­cour­aged and per­se­cuted around the world. I vol­un­teer for too many things and expect too much of myself in the few things that I do seem to get done each day. Like you, I have to do more in a body that will pro­gres­sively do less. This makes me sharpen my life strate­gies. Sooner or later all of the impos­si­ble sit­u­a­tions will hit me at once, and then I will tran­scend them all (a res­ur­rec­tion theme com­mon to my phi­los­o­phy of life).

It is not a mat­ter of just hav­ing a long “to do” list but one of seek­ing deeper pur­poses. Being busy is not hard to do; being effec­tive is. There is a world of dif­fer­ence between the two. Going through the motions is not the same as get­ting to the heart. The first can be accom­plished by the end of the day, the sec­ond takes burn­ing the mid­night oil.

I am sit­ting here smil­ing because there is no way I can meet all of today’s dead­lines. What I will meet instead is more impor­tant: the chal­lenge of the impos­si­ble. I know its face well and you do too. In the end we win against it because we are going to over­come it with the Eternal.