Researched and thought of how to do path finding. - fail

I never understood how pathfinding worked. After spending a couple of hours thinking about it and looking thru pages with information on it I still do not understand it. I have no idea how a closed and open list are used and have no idea how to create a path.

I thought of selecting the nearest connecting cell and the next nearest connected cell to generate a path and this sometimes seem to work. But dead ends do not work.

I hope I will someday understand how to do path finding. By the way. I still have to read through brian stouts articles on gamautra on path finding. But the articles will probably not explain path finding in such a way that I can understand it.