Navigating Impossibility

   There are often situations in life in which something seems utterly untenable and impossible. I have found that in situations like this, when I have truly done everything I could to facilitate the situation, the only thing I could really do is to wait and observe the conditions unfolding. In my workplace today, for example, I was tasked with assignments that seemed utterly beyond my ability or comprehension, simply because I lack the context to know the particular department that the business testing was related to. Throughout my daily walk lunch period, I felt a sense of frustration, not knowing how to resolve my lack of knowledge, aside from asking a lot of questions that could end up bothering my co-workers. When I came back from work, I received an email from a supervisor which laid out a more structured set of questions and test scenarios that I could follow. In this way, something that started out as "impossible" eventually shaped into something that is more doable and tenable.
   This perhaps goes to show me many things. The first is that, in the spirit of Chan, we can say that many of our problems are purely created. They are not real problems, as long as I don't hold myself to the idea that something has to be "resolved" in order for things to go smoothly. Sometimes simply sitting with the situation for a while will furnish new possibilities, such as an unexpected form of structured help that might come from a person having more experience. It might also take the form of realizing that this task wasn't entirely "mine" to begin with but was rather the task of many people with different skill levels and sets. Finally, the idea comes to mind that sitting with the unknown and with some degree of ambivalence and anxiety can allow for an eventual embrace of paradox, which takes the form of the meeting of opposites and conflicts, often taking place through a slow process of accommodation.