The Questions We Ask

Have you ever asked yourself the question, “Why am I thinking the thoughts that I’m thinking?”  You know by now that I am all about the thinking.  Our thinking is the source of our lives, and we don’t fully appreciate the value in finding what I’ve referred to as the “edges” of our thinking.   When you find an edge, it allows you to see that the way of thinking you’re engaged in is actually very dynamic and yes, complex; but it is also finite and more importantly, your thinking is not YOU.  It’s just one finite way of thinking.  Finite like a chair is finite or a car is finite.  Finite meaning once you can see the whole of it; you really can stop engaging in the thinking if it no longer serves you.  You begin to see that mostly you’re not really thinking, you’re regurgitating thoughts you’ve already had, and thoughts that others have had before you.

Currently, I’m in a 6-month self-development program working on various aspects of my life.  One of the tasks asked of us is to sift through our lives and find every wrong we’ve ever done, every lie we’ve ever told that we haven’t owned up to. Basically, we’re looking for every thing there is in our lives that we need to confess.  This, of course, is not a new concept.  You could get this same advice by attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (which this is not) or sitting in a therapist’s chair (which this is not).  The point of the exercise is to go back and complete those things that have happened in the past so that you can truly own them and leave them where they happened - in the past.

So right now, as you read this, your mind is likely starting to pull out and dust off some of those wrongs you’ve committed in your life that you haven’t owned up to.  And so while it wasn’t articulated this way, your mind is responding to a question, something like, “What wrongs haven’t I made right in my life?”  Consider this, your mind is always responding to a question.  When you go into your closet in the morning to get dressed, your mind is answering the question, “What should I wear today?”  When you’re trudging into work, pissed off that you have to go, your mind is responding to the question, “Why do I have to go to work today?”  The edges of these “whole” ways of thinking are bound together by some fundamental question.

Mostly in life, we are more interested in answers than questions.  Problem is if you’re not interested in the questions, you might be dilly-dallying with answers that are making no real difference in your life.  So for instance, confessing can certainly be a powerful thing to do, but if the intention of the exercise is to confess so that the past is left in the past, doesn’t the asking of the question itself contradict the intent.  Before you read this post, you likely were not even thinking about your past wrongdoings.  Before I focused your mind on that question, your past wrongs likely weren’t on your mind.  Certainly, not all of them!  Absent my question, those misdeeds were residing exactly where they happened – in the past!!!

And so there is nothing inherently valuable in sifting through to find all of our past misdeeds just as there is nothing inherently valuable in struggling in life or inherently valuable in any of the thoughts you are having at any given moment.  There is only what you’re thinking and the impact that your thinking is having on your life.  So you might find yourself thinking about your relationship with your spouse and how upset they make you and what you’re going to do about it, and “Dammit, we must come to some resolution about this issue.”  Have you though ever questioned whether you need to spend your life engaging in that line of thinking at all?  Have you ever questioned whether the problem that you absolutely believe must get solved actually needs to get solved?  That it actually deserves your time?  Have you ever considered that what your spouse did wouldn’t be an issue in the first place until you thought it so?  Until you raised the question, “Why did he do this?”  In other words, we are really good at beating people (or life) up with our expectations and our questions, but we never stop to really consider that we are the one’s holding the expectation.  Without us, there would be no need for beating because there would be no one holding the expectation.  There would be no one asking the question.

My point is that mostly in life you have very little control.  You don’t have control of whether the sun shines.  You don’t have control of what the economy is doing.  You don’t have control of your boss’ personality, but the one thing you have absolute 100% control over is your thoughts.  And don’t interpret the above as some sort of strategy like “Oh, he’s saying confessing is bad, and we should never confess” or “He’s saying that you should never confront your spouse about something.”

No, he’s not saying that.  What he is saying is you have a finite number of heartbeats to have on this planet.  You have a finite number of moments to live and thus you have a finite number of moments to have thoughts.

You get to choose how you spend those moments.

You get to choose the thoughts you think.

We all get to choose the questions we ask.