AtQ – What if Things were Different?

Powerful Questions for Spiritual Growth

I’m coming in late this week as Sunday was my birthday, and I took few days off – interrupting a still fragile writing schedule. It was a harder day this year. That’s saying something as I’ve had a hard time with milestones in general in the past. The hardness used to come from feeling as though I hadn’t achieved enough to be celebrated, especially given my own aims and expectations. Now it comes from not being able to share the milestones with my dad. The pain of missing my dad is a reality that I contend with daily, alongside the dreams and visions of life toward which I press. As it happens, this week’s question has something to do with this tension as well.

In this week’s Talking Note, I explored the possibility of moving from the position of a wounded healer to that of a healed healer. One of the most powerful things about wounds is that they require attention and inspire adaptation. If the attention and adaptation is not seen as a temporary necessity, they can turn into a regularity. That is, the pain which we must deal with turns into our central focus. The adaptations we have made to bear living through the experience of pain become our regular mode. Instead of temporarily tending to the wounds as they require, our habits of thought and action are formed by the wound.

This is one way of thinking about how we become stuck. One day our eyes open to the reality that we have taken on regular habits of thought and action that were necessary for the sake of a wound but are not what we actually want or think are good. To shake up these habits, we can use a question like the following:

What if things were different?