Many years ago, at the beginning of my speaking career, I created and delivered a workshop on creativity at a
Toastmasters International Conference. In my research on the topic, I read a book called
Five Star Mind by Tom Wujek, and it talked about the power of questions to give your mind focus. This story is an excerpt from the book:
When the Rembrandt painting “The Night Watch” was restored and returned to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the curators performed a simple yet remarkable experiment. They asked visitors to submit questions about the painting. The curators then prepared answers to over fifty questions according to popularity…
In a room next to the gallery which held the painting, the curators papered the walls with these questions (and answers). Visitors had to pass through this room before entering the gallery. The curious outcome was that the average length of time people spent viewing the painting increased from six minutes to over half an hour.
Visitors alternated between reading questions and answers and examining the painting. They said that the questions encouraged them to look longer, to look closer, and to remember more. The questions helped them create richer ideas about the painting and to see the painting in new ways. Like a series of magnets, the questions attracted the visitors’ thoughts to fresh ideas.
Becoming A Curious Curator
I loved this story because it was such a powerful and quantitative example of how asking questions sends the mind on a mission, like a heat-seeking missile, to seek out the answers. I also loved the story because I’ve actually been to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and had seen Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (many years before its restoration). It was my senior year in college and I had backpacked all over Europe for 4 months. During that trip, I had never felt so lost and alone in my whole life. A culmination of childhood tragedies had left me standing on the balcony of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de la Guard in Marseilles, shaking my fist at the sky and crying out “My God, why have you forsaken me?” (this story is fully captured in Chapter 8:
Kat on a Hot Tin Roof in my forthcoming book,
The 9 Lives of Kat)
Obviously what happened to me was nothing compared to what Jesus had been through when he screamed out those words. But pain is pain and my wounds were on the inside. While sobbing on that balcony, I got a flash of insight that those were not Jesus’s last words. He went on to say “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.”
In that moment, I decided to ask a new question. I desperately wanted to know,
Is there more to life than pain? and my mind set out to discover the answer.
This morning, while journaling, I had a major breakthrough that I absolutely had to share. I discovered that…
I’ve been asking the wrong question!!
Here is what came through me in my writing today:
You have asked for the truth. Many years ago you asked the question, is there more to life than pain? Perhaps it is time to just answer “yes” and form a new question because from that standpoint, your point of reference is pain, and energetically you are attracting more pain back to you.
As you know, a question gives the mind focus and seeks out a targeted response and delivers to you every example of that. So the response to your question, is there more to life than pain? delivered so many examples of others with successful businesses, happy relationships, gorgeous homes, tropical vacations, fun experiences, celebrity and high achievement. However, because your question also asked from the vibrational, unsaid perspective of “because I am in so much pain” – every example of a life without pain continued to bring you pain in the form of envy and comparison.
Like Jesus asking “Why have you forsaken me?” you kept asking that energetically. Whereas Jesus, even while hanging on the cross, remembered the truth and transcended all of it in His final act of forgiveness: Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.
Jesus demonstrated the struggle of humanity and the questions of the mind, while offering us the most powerful methodology for miraculous transformation – FORGIVENESS.
YIKES! Time for a new question, huh? But first I must forgive the question and any illusion that blocked the truth. Forgiveness is like the great eraser that will wipe clean the erroneous questions asked, the judgments made, the comparisons weighed and return us all to the truth of who we truly are.
Take time and examine the questions you’re asking yourself and see if they are leading you on a fool’s errand or back to the truth.
If you find yourself asking “Why me?”
Stop it. Forgive it. Change it.
Ask and it is given. We all just need to ask better questions!
