In the too-busy, too-much-to-do world most of us are living in, it is very easy to feel overwhelmed and to believe the task ahead of us is impossible to complete.
Notice where the word impossible is pointing. It is almost never a statement about right now. It is a statement about a projected future: the whole thing, all at once, finished. Nothing is impossible in this moment. In this moment there is only the next thing.
The line itself is usually hung on Nelson Mandela. The Nelson Mandela Foundation says there is no record of him saying it. It isn’t in his speeches, his letters, or his books. Which is its own small lesson about how a true thing travels: it picks up a famous name along the way, because we trust a saying more when someone we admire is standing behind it.
Overwhelm is not one feeling. There is a part of us doing the projecting, running the whole span of the work forward in time and reporting back that it cannot be done. That part is not lying to us. It is trying to keep us from failing at something enormous. But it is answering a question nobody can answer: can I do all of it? And the answer to that is always no, because all of it is not a thing anyone does.
We have to learn to take small bites and baby steps and ask ourselves, “okay, what’s next?” The goal seems impossible when I look too far into the future. So: what is the next one small thing that needs to be done?
This is not only a change of thought. Overwhelm lives in the body before it becomes a sentence: the held breath, the braced shoulders, the low hum that says too much. You cannot reason your way out of an impossibility mindset while the body is still braced against the whole of it. But a body can feel one next step as doable. That is part of why the question works. It hands the nervous system something its own size.
The practice is to stay in this present moment. What can I do right now? What is possible in this moment?
In doing so, we remove ourselves from the impossibility mindset. And in relinquishing impossibility thinking, we experience ourselves as more capable of taking action and of creating our own destinies.
None of this makes a hard thing easy. Small bites do not shrink the mountain. What they change is who you are while you climb it. Not someone frozen in front of the whole of it, but someone doing the next thing, and then the thing after that.
I have lived long enough now to look back at things I once believed I could not do. Many of them began with a decision. Deciding is real and it matters, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But deciding is not what got them done. What got them done was a long run of next things, most of them small, most of them unremarkable, none of them counted at the time. The decision opens the door. The next thing is what walks through it.