"They say that one's determination is the real difference between doing the possible and the impossible, but I say that it it is nothing less than 'faith' that is responsible; faith in self, faith in others and faith in God! Doing the impossible will sometimes involve believing in yourself more than you do in others and listening to yourself sometimes more than to the advice of others. I once read somewhere, 'It was only when someone told me that it was impossible to do and I believed them that I stopped doing it.'
Most of what I've learned about belief, I took from my dearly departed mother, who died thirty years ago today. My mother, being Irish from head to toe was one of life's dreamers. She believed in the power of honest dreams. To her, an 'honest dream' was your dream, not the dream of another. She always used to say, 'Dream your own dream, Billy, or someone else will dream it for you.' She strongly held the view that, only they who are prepared to believe in that which they cannot see, will one day come to see the thing in which they first believed. Only they can feel the faith. The impossible in life is often the untried and my mother brought me up to believe that all things become possible with belief.
When I was a growing child in my parents council house, my mother frequently spoke about the cottage she would someday live in. She would constantly describe it with red roses around the front porch. Given that my father was a labourer with a small wage and large family, I would often tell my mother that her daytime reverie was no more than a pipe dream that would never come to be. When she died, we carried her coffin from her council flat that she and my father had moved to after all their children had grown up, married and left home. I missed my mother more than my heart could bear at the time and over the two weeks following her funeral and burial, I was the one who went through her belongings as dad did not feel up to it. Mum possessed very little and therefore left this life with not much more than she came into it; except her dream of one day living in her very own country cottage with red roses gracing its front porch.
I had always thought it impossible that my mother's dream would ever come true, but in a way I was proved wrong. As I looked through her belongings after her death and cried with each item I found attached to a memory of good times past, I found a photograph of a cottage that had roses around its front porch. I had no way of knowing if the roses in the photograph were red, as the photograph was in sepia tone, but given that my mother's favourite flower had always been a red rose, I am happy to believe that the cottage flowers were red roses also.
What has all this to do with belief, I hear you ask? An old sepia-toned photograph image of a cottage with front porch framed in roses is not an actual cottage that my mother was to one day live in. But you see, that's precisely what it was! All of her life, my mother was a dreamer. All of her life, my mother did live in that country cottage that was locked in her mind. It was her dream cottage, her mental escape which she daily visited as she worked her fingers to the bone scrubbing the floor and doing other household chores in our council house on Windybank Estate. I never knew then that as she swept the pathway in front of our Windybank home, the image she held was of sweeping her cottage pathway and clearing away the fallen rose petals.
It is no coincidence that from the many images I cherish today, that country cottage scenes hold a special place in my heart, or that every house I have lived in has always had roses near its front door, or that I now live in a cottage type property in a beautiful countrified setting. I believe that I am probably living out my mother's dream and by so doing, as she is always with me in my heart, she is living it out with me also. Only he who can see the invisible can do the impossible!
There have been many occasions in my life when I have seen logic defied and a number of times when I have defied it myself. I have come to believe in my old age that the wisest among us use the word 'impossible' with the greatest of caution, and I have come to know that the ones with the greatest capacity to believe in self, others and God, use it not at all.
My mother, during her life, chose to dwell in the possibility of her dream to which her imaginings knew no limit. So many folk miss out so much today by their incapacity to believe and their reluctance to dream. Hold on tight to your beliefs, let no other shake your faith. Place your own red roses around your country cottage and let no other dream your dreams. Below is my mother's favourite song which she sung (mostly out of tune), throughout my childhood. It is sung by one of her favourite singers who became a good friend of mine from 1990 onwards. I miss you, Mum. I love you." William Forde: April 26th, 2016.
https://youtu.be/Y5RhWVlXF0Q