step. It was her fault, because she’d phrased the question wrong. She tried again. “Will you honestly answer something for me?”
He nodded, eager for answers.
“When was the first time you experienced feeling powerless in your life?”
It took him a moment to file through the significant events of his life. He stopped. “The accident.” Two words. Spoken like he’d never said them before.
She kept walking and he followed again. “Do you remember anything about it?”
“Yes.” They walked in silence for a while. Then he spoke again. “I remember being thrown. A sense of suspension, my organs feeling weightless. And . . .”
Without slowing her steps, she waited.
“And a lot of blood. A lot.” His face went pale, and his aura dulled enough to match it, as though all that blood from his accident and the shooting mixed and became indistinguishable as it drained from his body. “Powerless would about describe it.”
She didn’t let him linger in those feelings. “And what did you do with that?”
“Nothing.” He’d obviously buried the memory until this moment. “The next thing I remember is the doctor telling me that I would never walk again.” His voice was stronger now. This was the part he was comfortable with.
“And what was your response?”
“To prove him wrong. Naturally. Wouldn’t that be anyone’s response?”
“No. You already know that’s not everyone’s response.” She picked up the pace and he did the same. “So, you’ve never considered the role that forces outside your control—the universe—played in your recovery?”
They arrived at an intersection and waited for the light to turn green.
“If I had left things to the universe”—yes, he used air quotes—“after my accident, where would that have left me? Still in a wheelchair, that’s where.”
The light turned green and she started walking again. For the next few minutes they walked in silence, responses flooding her brain, but she needed to get this right.
“Consider for a moment another side of what you’re saying. Don’t you think there was any element of luck in the fact that your efforts paid off? Yes, you gave getting out of that wheelchair your all. The reason you were able to heal yourself was that your injuries responded to the retraining therapies you used. Yes, there was a really small chance of them working and you worked really hard to give that chance a chance. But there was a chance.”
He followed her in silence until the studio came into view.
She stopped and turned to him. “If your injury had involved destroyed spinal nerves or something like that, then no amount of effort would have mattered. There was an element out of your control that worked in your favor. You put everything into it. But things out of your control supported that. You did your best and trusted the universe to do the rest and you didn’t even know it. You just have to do the same thing again.”
He was gazing down at her in that way he had as though she had all the answers, as though she were, in fact, all the answers he’d ever sought. “But how can I do something that I did without knowing I was doing it? Don’t you see, I don’t know how to.”
“You do. You do know. You’re just afraid you won’t get the result you want.”
A small smile touched his lips, but not his eyes. “So I’m a coward on top of being a control freak.”
“Being afraid doesn’t make you a coward. We’re all afraid of not getting what we want. But to get what we want we have to combine both—doing our part and trusting the universe with the rest. You of all people cannot refuse to do your part because you’ve suddenly realized that there are parts outside your control. You don’t have that luxury. Too many people trust you to have courage. Too many people have put their faith in you to fix the things they’re afraid of.”
“What if I’m not worthy of that faith?”
“Do you know how I know that you’re worthy? Because when you told me you wanted to be a public servant and not a politician I believed you. I believed you because I saw how much you believed it yourself. You promised the people who believe in you that you’d fix things. A politician can stop running for election, but a public servant can’t stop serving. Abdul did his job, you need to do yours. You might be afraid, but I know you’re not a liar.”
The storm in his eyes went darker. I