If you aren't old enough to have lived through his triumph and the decades of struggle that preceded it, I'm guessing you might be a bit taken aback by the global celebration of the life of Nelson Mandela that has been triggered by his passing. So here's a bit of context.

It is tempting to look back on historical events like the transformation of South Africa from a racist apartheid government to a functional multi-racial democracy and presume that it was somewhat inevitable. After all, things did work out the way they did, so the current South Africa was obviously always possible. Indeed, given how bizarrely antiquated the apartheid system must look by 21st century standards, one might argue that today's South Africa was even likely.

Except, it wasn't.

For those of us who came of age during the 1970s and 1980s, the struggle in South Africa seemed like one of those intractable crises that would never end, or at least would never end well. Sure, we supported boycotts and urged our university trustees to divest from companies that did business in South Africa, but these were largely viewed as symbolic gestures—nobody really expected them to have much impact. There was too much at stake for the nation's white minority rulers—the fate of their white counterparts elsewhere in Africa was so damn grim—that it was hard to imagine anything short of violence loosening their grip on power.

Imagine if, beyond all expectation, a Palestinian leader, after several decades in an Israeli prison, were to successfully negotiate over the next year or so the creation of an independent, democratic Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capitol, and then lead his people to full reconciliation and peaceful coexistence with the state of Israel, before handing over power to a democratically elected successor. That's kinda what Mandela did.

And there was no reason to expect he would. Or even could. Unless you grew up during the era when the prospects for a peaceful solution in South Africa seemed so damn bleak, it is impossible to convey how astonishing Mandela's accomplishments really were.

And everything else aside, that is what I find so inspiring about the life of Nelson Mandela, who for me became a sort of patron saint of windmill tilters. At his trial in 1964, convicted of a crime for which he faced a possible death sentence, Mandela defied his own lawyers' advice to give the following defiant statement:

During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

It is not simply what Mandela ultimately accomplished, or how he accomplished it, that the world is celebrating; it is that despite the odds, he accomplished it at all. For one of the lessons Mandela's life teaches is that nothing in politics—no matter how improbable—is impossible.