Nancy Kline
AUTHOR

THEN WHAT?

​Reconsidering Freedom

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​“We have freedom of choice, but not freedom of consequence.”

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Those words are from Curt Cignetti, Head Coach of the NCAA National Champion Indiana University football team. You just never know where you will find wisdom. Not an American football enthusiast myself (thirteen-year-old cheerleader was as keen as I got, never knowing quite what a “down” was, and just doing whatever the Head Cheerleader did, plus loving my pompoms), I nevertheless now, 67 years later, would like to have lunch with Curt Cignetti. I would like to talk with him about freedom.

Early on I would ask Cignetti what he thinks about Tim Snyder’s take on freedom (On Freedom, https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom), especially Snyder’s distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to.”

But most eagerly I would ask him what he thinks about the “Then What?” question. I think he would find it interesting because “Then what?” jerks our attention toward consequence. In moments of decision asking ourselves the “Then What?” question can be a path-changer. We just have to remember to do it (it is slippery because it dismantles denial), and then stick around for the answer.

Engaging with the question can be as simple (and consequential) as this:

I deserve to do only what I want to do, and I will!

Then what?

I will alienate my colleagues.

or:

No matter how exhausted I get, I will stay up all night to finish my paper.

Then what?

I may fail my exam tomorrow morning.

The power of “Then what?” lies in its lugging the unconscious into the conscious. Consequences are a given. But our consciousness of them is not. And it is our consciousness of consequences that gives us freedom. The question allows us to choose now in terms of the consequences, freeing us from disasters later.

“Then what?” is one of my four favourite questions 1. I keep it tucked securely but accessibly in my planning brain. So generally, thankfully, I nowadays  do remember to ask it before I decide, not after.

And recently, as a kind of elucidating exercise, I surveyed three of my most unfortunate life decisions and found no “Then what?” anywhere on the journey. In each case I did eventually correct course, but that was a lot of trouble, leaving skid marks along the way.

The main thing I value about “Then what?” is that to embrace it we have to be grownups. A la Cignetti, we have to recognise that every decision we make and action we take has consequences. On paper that observation is obvious. But in practice humans seem to assume immunity to repercussion or impact on others, and even sometimes on our world. We prance around deciding things, and then we wonder why life so often crashes into walls. We stand there, dazed. Like children.

There is a way back to the blissful (because real) grownup state. That journey is just two words, plus remembering to ask them and having the courage to answer them. And the pompoms to celebrate them.

“Then What?”

1 The other three questions are: “What do you think?’, “If this were entirely up to you, what would you do?”, and “What do you know now, that you are going to find out in a year?”

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