Article July 26, 1999 Issue

ELIMINATE THE "CANNOTS"

Thora H. Wardwell

At one time our family was given a puzzle to work out, one involving numbers. It was fun, and the whole family became busily engrossed in trying to solve it. Some found the correct solution in a very short time, but I studied it for weeks with no results.

One day I asked a member of the family to give me a clue as to what I was doing wrong. The answer was very revealing. It was this: discover what it is that you cannot do. Eliminate the approaches to the problem that are not leading you to the correct answer. I proceeded along these "cannot" lines, and I, too, solved the puzzle.

This experience taught me a spiritual truth. If we're faced with a tough problem in any aspect of our lives and we're not making headway, we may need to examine our thinking and our actions to find "cannots," dead-end assumptions about ourselves or others, and discard them.

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