February 2026

February Thought for the Month

"Start by doing what's necessary, then do what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible."

~ Francis of Assisi

No one gets through life without facing obstacles or challenges that seem to have no solution. While it's tempting to give up or settle for the status quo in these situations, we need to remind ourselves of a truth that fear or doubt can obscure: we can make possible many things people assume are impossible.

The technologies that ease all areas of our lives today were once considered impossible. For example, take television. Before science made it work, saying to the wrong person that one day we'd be able to send moving images through the air into a box with a glass window for people to watch would have gotten you a stint in the madhouse. Thankfully someone took that impossible idea and ran with it.

More than one hundred years ago, a young farm boy named Philo Farnsworth got the idea of television. It didn't happen immediately. He faced and overcame many setbacks during the eight years it took for him to go from concept to the first working model. Over the decades, other creative and determined innovators built on his idea to bring us to the point where that impossibility is now commonplace.

There's a lyric in Roger and Hammerstein's Cinderella that goes "because these daft and dewey-eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes, impossible things are happening every day." It takes determination, perseverance, creativity, and often courage, to achieve what others, including that negative voice in our heads, deem impossible. Sometimes we much choose to be daft and dewey-eyed if we want to accomplish what common sense tells us is unattainable.

[Thought and image design by Elaine C. Oldham]