LITMIR.BIZ

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been avoiding: the passionless marriage you pretend is better than ever until one day your husband walks out; the distant daughter you tell everyone is really doing fine until you discover the stash of heavy drugs in her drawer; the sixty-hour-a-week job you claim to love in spite of how exhausted you always are, until you collapse with a heart attack one day.

      Sometimes “it” is loss—loss of love, loss of money, loss of trust, loss of security, loss of job, loss of health, loss of opportunity, loss of hope. Sometimes “it” sneaks up on you quietly, like a thick fog slowly rolling in over your life, so that nothing seems clear to you anymore and you feel lost. And sometimes “it” isn’t sneaky at all, but bold. You know “it” is coming—you can feel it breathing down your neck. Still, you tell yourself it will miss you, like those asteroids that hurtle toward the earth but never quite get a direct hit. But you are wrong. “It” does not miss.

      “It” is whatever you didn’t want to happen, whatever you didn’t want to feel, whatever you didn’t want to face, whatever you didn’t want ever to have to experience. “It” is always unexpected, even when you’ve watched “it” approach every step of the way, because there is simply no way you can imagine that you will feel so scared or confused or miserable or disheartened or stuck or out of control—until you do.

      I’ve concluded something else about the unexpected—it always seems to show up at the worst moment. Like a guest with horrific timing who, year after year, invariably chooses the most hectic weekend of your life to come stay with you, the unexpected has a knack for choosing just the wrong instant to arrive. Doesn’t “it” always seem to happen when you are already the most stressed, overextended and under pressure, when you have just announced that you cannot take one more thing going wrong? “I can’t deal with this right now!” you lament. “This is not a good time.” But let’s be honest—is there ever a “good” time for the arrival of unwelcome events, insights, or challenges? Of course there isn’t.

      The unexpected is always inconvenient.

      The great statesman Henry Kissinger summed it up succinctly: “Next week there can’t be any crisis. My schedule is already full.”

      The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to a place where we think we can’t handle what is happening It’s too much. It’s gone too far … There’s no way we can manipulate the situation to make ourselves come out looking good. No matter how hard we try, it just won’t work. Basically, life has just nailed us. —Pema Chodron

      When I was in elementary school, I had a teacher whom I will call Mrs. Rhodes. She was one of those educators whose choice of vocation was a mystery, for it was obvious, even to me at the tender age of eight, that she possessed an intense dislike of children that she made no attempt to hide from us. Determined to retaliate, the little boys used to amuse themselves by tossing wads of spit-covered chewing gum at her head when she wasn’t looking, hoping to implant their peppermint-scented weapons in her tight mass of metallic-gray pin curls.

      Mrs. Rhodes was a stickler for accuracy in all things, and one of her favorite ways to torture us was to excoriate us for our mistakes in front of the entire class. I will never forget the time I became the “victim of the day.” We were in the middle of a writing exercise, and I raised my hand to make a request.

      “Yes, Barbara?” Mrs. Rhodes said scowling at me.

      “May I please be excused to go to the bathroom?” I said in as soft a voice as possible.

      “Don’t mumble—I hate mumblers—what did you say?”

      “I said, may I please be excused.”

      “Why?” Mrs. Rhodes barked.

      “I can’t believe she is going to make me say it,” I thought to myself. I took a deep breath. “Because I want to go to the bathroom.”

      Everyone in the class began to giggle. “SILENCE!” Mrs. Rhodes shouted, and then she turned back to me. “Barbara De Angelis,” she said, “So you want to go to the bathroom. Well, we all want lots of things, don’t we, class? But we don’t get them! No ma’am.”

      “Please, Mrs. Rhodes,” I pleaded, “I just want to go to the bathroom.”

      Mrs. Rhodes walked up to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and in large letters wrote the word W-A-N-T. “Do you see this word, class?” she squawked. “To use it is to express a personal preference, as in ‘I want to play on the swings’, or ‘I want to eat a candy bar.’ It does NOT mean the same thing as this word—” and she spelled out N-E-E-D. “This word does not express a personal preference, it expresses what one considers a necessity, a requirement, an emergency, as in, ‘Mrs. Rhodes, I need to go to the bathroom.’”

      She turned back toward me. I had sunk down as low as I could in my metal chair, for even my little eight-year-old brain knew what was coming next. My classmates were giddy with anticipation, drunk with the joy of watching someone other than themselves be mortified.

      “So, Barbara, would you like to rephrase your statement?” Her voice oozed with disdain.

      Like a confession given to the enemy only under prolonged torture, the words came tumbling reluctantly out of my mouth: “I … I … nee … need to go to the bathroom!”

      “Well, then,” she said with a sick smile, “why didn’t you say so? By all means, go. We wouldn’t want you to have an accident, would we, class?”

      I fled. The memory is so vivid, even decades later—my little legs speeding down the empty hallway toward the restroom, the sound of mocking laughter still echoing in the distance behind me. You will be relieved to know that I made it on time. Believe me, so was I.

      I share this gruesome tale to make a point crucial to the premise of this book:

       When we are uncomfortable enough in life, we will begin to ask questions in an attempt to relieve ourselves of our misery. We will do this regardless of how frightened we are of asking the questions or hearing the answers. We will question because we can’t not question anymore. We will question not simply because we want to, but because we need to.

       And the question that rises up from deep within us will be: “How did I get here?”

      At times of confusion, crisis, frustration and bewilderment, in moments as Pema Chodron stated above, when “life has nailed us” and we can no longer pretend that things don’t feel awful, “How did I get here?” is the most honest, and in fact the only response we can have. When you are squirming in your seat long enough, you have no choice but to finally raise your hand. As I learned from Mrs. Rhodes, when you have to go, you have to go.

      If you get rid of the pain before you have answered its questions, you get rid of the self along with it. —Carl Jung

      The process of gaining wisdom begins with the asking of questions. The word “question” is derived from the Latin root quaerere, which translates as “to seek.” This same root is the source of the word “quest,” to go on a search or a pursuit. Ultimately, that is what a question is—the first step in a search for knowledge, for insight, for truth.

      We spend our life looking for answers. This need to know is deeply human and starts in our earliest years. Any parent is aware of this from having listened to the constant inquiries of his son or daughter: “Why is the sky blue? Where do we go when we die? Why do you wear glasses? How does Grandma’s voice get in the telephone? Where do babies come from?” As children, we turned to our elders with our questions, confident that they would have answers. After all, they were the grown-ups.

      Now we are the adults, the ones who are supposed to have the answers for our own children or grandchildren, for our clients and employees, for our students and patients, for our customers and coworkers. So when we go through challenging times,

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