Why can’t I?
“Questions are the engines of the intellect,” David Hackett Fisher once wrote. He is a brilliant historian whose work opened my eyes—and mind—as a grad student.
“The quality of your life reflects the quality of your questions,” said Tony Robbins, infomercial king and self-help guru, a man I would never take seriously (or take at all). But this is a good quote.
“When we ask disempowering questions, we get disempowering answers,” said Lou Redmond, one of my favorite meditation teachers on InsightTimer. He also a podcaster, author, seminar leader—that is, a commercial “product.” But he’s got a great backstory, and he humbly proclaims, “I’m not an enlightened master, nor some guru who’ll tell you the answers. I’m still learning to trust and surrender every day. I am, as I like to say, a Friend on the Journey.”
The point is: Questions.
To not ask questions is to be incurious—about the world and about ourselves. To not ask is to be dull and uncaring.
To frame the questions we ask as negatives is to prompt a dispiriting narrative. Why is everything so messed up? How come things are so difficult? Why does this always happen to me?
The little stories we tell ourselves to answer these questions focus on deficiencies, limitations, and shortcomings. They are about victimhood, stagnation, lack of agency.
Fuck that. Really.
What you think is how you act is who you become.
I’m not throwing my hat in the self-help guru ring (a three-ring circus, isn’t it?) but it occurred to me as I was hiking yesterday afternoon how the swapping of a single interrogative adverb (ha!) plus the slight modification of a modal auxiliary verb (now I am just showing off) can be a complete game/ mind/ life changer.
Instead of asking:
Why can’t I ….?
Ask:
How can I….?
Forgive the revival tent vibe of that, my friends. But: Boom. Simple: We ask the empowering question. We think our way into the empowering answer. And, to quote Tom Petty, the future is wide open.
Should you now want to learn oh-so-much-more about interrogative adverbs, modal auxiliary verbs (or predicate adjectives, indefinite pronouns, past participles, etc.) and the joyful intricacies of our language, may I suggest When Words Collide?