Possibilities

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison

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Recently I awoke with the word possibilities on my mind. So I spent the day thinking about possibilities, and how I can make them become a reality in my life.

Yet if truth were told, I’m often tempted to throw in the possibility towel when something I’ve worked hard for fails. The fear of another failure creates stymied thinking. Courage corrodes and confidence rusts over until the temptation to do something safe settles in my soul.

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Possibilities

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

I’m sure glad that Thomas Edison didn’t quit after he failed the first time, or the second, or the three thousandth. Here’s an amazing quote from the inventor himself I found on wikiquote.org:

“I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. … I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.” http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

This quote boggles my mind. I found myself wondering what character traits a person possesses who can devise 3,000 theories? I get discouraged after the first round of failure. Yet Edison also acknowledged that there was a time when he needed to abandon a theory. When he found it was untenable: flawed, unsustainable, and indefensible.

As a middle school literacy teacher, I find that tenacity is very important. Every student’s brain is a puzzle. My quest is to discover how each student learns most effectively, what motivates the youth, and what tools the student needs to be successful. Often what I think will work does not work, and I must release my preconceived ideas and move on to try something else.

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My artistic life is similar. I go after something until I hit a wall, an impenetrable boundary I cannot pass through nor climb over. Then and only then do I find a way around the wall. Sometimes I’m tempted to abandon the project and sometimes that is exactly what I need to do.

Possibilities

Whether in classrooms or personal lives, possibilities arrive like ships moving towards shore. Yet they dock in deep waters. We must decide whether to take the risk to swim out to them. Once there, only a select few have ladders we can use to climb onboard. It is the tenacious person who persists until they find a way up.

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