What's the worst that could happen?
The meditative practice of self-inquiry // The art of asking the right questions
“I would end up poor without anything to eat.” That was the answer to this question I asked myself sometime in September 2021 when I started to get honest with myself about pursuing a sabbatical, learning how to dance flamenco after moving to Spain.
I sat with that thought and really thought about it - have I been poor before? have I gone without anything to eat? I haven’t thanks to my collection of privileges. And as I sat with this, it dawned on me that the last time I went hungry was a few days ago and it wasn’t because I didn’t have food to eat, or access to get food. In fact, I had made a very nice breakfast but I neglected it for about 4 hours to attend to the never-ending to-do list at work. I was not only starved of nourishment that I had accessible and readily available to me, but I was starving myself of living a life.
Stay with me now - I am well aware that the pandemic has mega-skewed our perceptions of how much we’re really living life: is it the social media reality curated/crafted life that we’re supposed to be living? or is the life that we imagined years ago that we’re executing against to bring into reality? are we living someone else’s desired lives? What is living anymore, anyways? Working from home, for those who were (un)lucky, has become its own monster. If you drown yourself in work to not face your life and are learning about boundary setting, raise your hands! (it me).
I have been living my life - I don’t take one second of it for granted. But when I asked myself this pivotal question, forced myself to sit with it, I saw a life that I had wanted for so long because younger me believed with all her heart that this is what a happy life looked like. I don’t ever remember asking myself when I was younger what a happy life felt like. In fact, when I so pithily realized that I’d gone hungry more times than I could count while working the kinda-cushy corporate job where occasionally I was doing interesting things while living in the big city, in a rented space by myself, I told myself the worst has already happened and….I’m still here. And I know something is missing. But for the first time, I realized I wasn’t only starving, I was craving something and until I could make it become a part of me I wasn’t going to stop. Nicky Jam sings in Ven y Hazlo Tu “Abría la nevera y no tenía qué comer” - I opened the fridge and I wasn’t even hungry. I have been rummaging through my recent adult life, trying to find the right thing in the fridge to fix that craving and finally satiate it.
I learned how to ask “what is the worst that could happen” when I first started counseling in undergrad. It was one of the first sessions I had with campus counseling and was supposed to help disrupt the onslaught of anxious thoughts that would inevitably take over. I didn’t know I had anxiety at that time - I thought I was worrying just the right amount and that probably everyone worried just as much as I did. I sought out counseling after freshman year because I had decided I didn’t want to major in biology given my poor performance in the pre-req courses. I was afraid of being a disappointment, and worse failing my parents by not doing everything I could in my power to live the life that was secure, stable, profitable and happy. The counselor described anxiety as an evolutionary process and did the oft-shared comparison of how our body is primed to respond to danger like a lion chasing us to get us to safety, and by asking ourselves “what’s the worst that could happen?” we could interrupt the avalanche of thoughts and conduct a true threat assessment.
Yeah…..
As an overachieving impressionable very compliant patient (still to this day), I found a way to weaponize this question. I would ask myself “what’s the worst that could happen” and scenario-planned ALL the potential fatalities, complications and then would write scripts in my head of all the possible ways I could respond to get it to a less worse situation. My mind became an R.L. Stine “Give Yourself Goosebumps” choose-your-own-ending process map, where the outcome was always worse. It’s taken a lot of years to unlearn and rewire my brain, yet in that moment the phantom question popped up. Is this a credible threat? I checked with my therapist, my friends - after I told them all the steps it would take and how I would de-risk the entire sabbatical process by drastically cutting down expenses (leave the city and move in with my family), increasing my earning potential very quickly (find a higher paying new job), moving everything into savings (saving), finding ways I could still earn an while I was abroad (teach English, maybe finally bartend?, tutor online, etc.). They weren’t worried. They told me I already knew what I wanted to do and had mapped out mostly everything I could do. I could choose an ending that worked out for me. So following “what’s the worst that could happen?” with sitting and contemplating, led to well I’m at the worst now, and then just silence.
Rainer Maria Rilke advises young poet Franz Kappus in one of my favorite and repetitive reads Letters to a Young Poet
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
In our shared reality, instant gratification has become more of a monster than what it was just a few years ago: one-day delivery, same-day return, post exactly what you’re eating before you eat it, live stream your own life in pretty decent quality! Slowness be damned and vilified! So how are we supposed to LIVE the questions? If we don’t seek aren’t we just being lazy, complacent? How can the point be to LIVE EVERY THING?Isn’t the point to live only the things that I truly really want? (read: conditioned to think I want, my perception of what others want for me).
Sitting practice (not the same as meditation) has been instrumental in the way I cope with my child-like mind that wants everything right this very minute. Sitting with the reality that despite working with a dietitian in the beginning of the year, watching years of my parents as new immigrants pinch pennies to make sure we could still eat our food, or even treat us out to restaurants, living with a chronic illness where nutrition can help ease flares, I actively refused to take 10 minutes to eat my breakfast because I had to make sure the right forms got emailed and I responded to pings so that I wouldn’t get fired (!!). Something needed to change and it had to be drastic.
So I played the question game: consultant edition. The question game mirrors the Eastern philosophy/religious practice of self-inquiry: the constant attention to the inner awareness of “I” or “I am” (cited from wikipedia). Except I’d pull up a Google doc and just write a question, and then answer it, and keep probing. This exercise has yielded answers, and also just filled up a lot of google docs with nonsense. Circling back to the top (heh - consultant lingo), consultants are trained to ask the client the right questions. The key to this is learning how to be a really attentive listener, listening for pain points that may be veiled in what the client says, and clients rarely just tell you what they want because sometimes they don’t even know what they want (not sure how much of this is the approach to sell additional services not relevant to the current project vs. truly adding value…).
I coached myself: I work as a consultant on really complex issues in operational and organization transformation. I have the skills to conduct a fair, objective threat assessment. The first step was to reframe threat to risk. I can do a generic, basic risk assessment of my current state, use that to inform my desired future state.
-for those who have gotten this far in the newsletter and are barely hanging on, welcome to the inner workings of my anxious mind, it goes in a lot of loops but eventually gets to the point. Feel free to stare out your window, walk up grab a drink, stretch, or even come back later -
The results of the risk assessment were clear: I don’t know how to live a life on my own terms. I don’t know how to take risks. I want to learn how to do both these things - for me. I want to grow my confidence outside my comfort zone. I also want to start a business. I need to pivot.
Rilke’s impassioned plea to live the questions now harks to the best consultants I’ve seen in action: they are patient, attentive, listeners. They don’t jump to give a solution immediately, they don’t rush the process, they sit with it. Maybe at one point they did, and they learned through trial and error that instant gratification doesn’t make much business sense. The art of asking the right questions is important but I continue to learn that the meditative quality of what happens after you ask the question, sitting in the enormity, the anxiety of the question, letting silence take up space is perhaps the more important part of the practice. Perhaps, even more than getting to the answer.
Priya - When I discovered the power of "what's the worst that can happen?" I felt liberated. I had focused so much anxiety and energy on "how to succeed?" in my purpose and choices that I had failed to notice that the right questions relate to failure. Failure in the best possible sense. Failure that says I tried something new. Failure that says I was brave and willing. Failure that makes room to grow and make better choices so that I may fail again doing something bigger and better. I am so happy that you have asked these questions of yourself and are ready to take chances you might not have if you had asked "how do I succeed?". Much love to you. Also, I just purchased a copy of Letters to a Young Poet. I don't know how I have missed reading this. Thank you! xoxo