"If only" vs "What if. . . ."

[shalanna]

As some of you know, my mother keeps her television tuned to the news stations CONTINUOUSLY, except when I intervene and turn it away because she and her telephone bank of kibitzers are getting too upset. Her room is just off the kitchen/breakfast area, so I have to hear the talk constantly and can't always tune it out. (She also tends to flip the small TV in the breakfast room on and to that channel all the time, so that makes it worse.) Sometimes you can hear something helpful, such as yesterday, when they talked about salmonella saintpaul and the symptoms--and I realized that this is what we've probably had for the past week or so. We have been eating lots of fresh Roma tomatoes both at home and at restaurants. *sigh* I do seem to be all right now, and she's a lot better, so whatever . . . but that was one of the few good things that came out of this news saturation.

Just now, I heard some pundits saying that "There's no use saying 'if only' or 'what if'--you only deal with the now!"

And they are half wrong.

I know it's because they aren't writers and don't really THINK through what they are saying. What they intended to say was don't dwell in the past and on what should have happened. "If only" can be damaging. I know this from so much personal experience.

But "WHAT IF?" is **not** bad and is **nothing like** what they were talking about. "What if?" is the path to scientific discovery. "What if" is the way to think outside the box and solve a problem with a new insight. "What if?" is the way novels and stories are written!

"What if" is a magic frigate to take us to the new horizons we'll only see if we are looking for them--while standing on the shoulders of giants.

NEVER let "them" say that "What if?" is bad. They're entirely incorrect (as they are most of the time) and are simply not thinking clearly. If you never said, "What if . . . I tried this on the OTHER way? Put this upside-down? Took off one of the clasps? Used screws instead of nails?" we would be in big trouble. If you never said, "What if a barren woman who has just come out of a fertility clinic having been told she'll never bear children walks past a Dumpster and hears a faint cry . . . and finds a newborn baby . . . and runs home, cleans the baby up, and tells everyone she had no idea she was pregnant until she suddenly gave birth herself?" then you would never have a novel like the one I abandoned a few years ago . . . well, that one got abandoned, but so do a lot of the eggs that the salmon struggle upstream to spawn and fertilize. My point was that if you never did a "what if?" you'd never come up with ANY novel, and you'd have no chance that it might be a goodie that time!

Remember . . . never be afraid to ask, "What if?"

And now I'm off to the Plano Steinway Hall to hear 'em play.

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

When "what if" is asked in the sense of "if only", or when it's used to avoid facing reality (when reality needs to be faced), it is bad.

When it's used in the sense you discuss, then it's a valuable and wonderful (in both senses) question.

Something tells me the pundits, unable to comprehend the second of those, were speaking to the first.

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

I think you're right. I would STILL not ever condone using "what if" in a negative sense to avoid facing reality, and usually that's not the sense it's used in (that honor usually goes to "if only.") You can ask, "What if the Civil War had been avoided?" "What if GWB hadn't won the last election?" A lot of good stuff can come out of such questions. Modeling is a great way to predict outcomes and look at whether the outcome you got is the only one you could've had. There are scientists running models to see what climate change/global warming is most likely going to do next . . . even though no one wants to look at the various potential outcomes. Maybe there's nothing we can do about it, if it's climate change that happens every few hundred years, but it doesn't hurt to ask "what happens if. . . ?"

Also, this saying keeps coming to mind every day or so:
"Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it." (George Santayana)

*sigh*