The Holy Sh*t Moment: How lasting change can happen in an instant

“Isn’t that one of her Horcruxes?” my son said.

The joke slayed; 10 points to Gryffindor.

Speaking of crazy grandmothers and things that slay, there was blood everywhere, and I was screaming. The blood was pouring out of my left knee. Childhood trauma provides vivid recollection despite more than four decades having past.

We were visiting my grandmother in Victoria. A friend named Brent was chasing me through the house in a game of tag, and the sliding glass door that led to the back deck was sparkling clean.

In other words, I thought it was open. I was only five.

Fortunately, I did not go through the glass. I hit it with my knee and it shattered, then I fell backward, away from the shards. Blood poured forth from my knee as screams ripped from my throat in equal measure. This, followed by Uncle Jim driving me to the hospital through the rolling coastal hills at a speed that punished the suspension of the pre-1970s-model four-door car while my mother had a minor meltdown in the back seat as she attempted to hold my knee together with six squares of toilet paper.

I still hadn’t stopped screaming. I remember the screaming, not the pain.

Thirty stitches plus an annoyed doctor and nurse later, we went back to Grandma’s house, and she proceeded to chew me out about her shattered door.

That was my first inkling she wasn’t such a nice person.

I achieved a fuller realization she was “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” a few years after destroying her window. My parents had split, and we had no choice but to live with her for six painful months. I was getting an apple and she told me to give her half. I got a knife and cut, and being a young lad, it was a haphazard job. I was left with one piece substantially larger than the other.

It seemed wise to give my grandmother the larger half, so I did. Then she proceeded to berate me for being a “greedy little bugger.” She told me I should have given her the bigger half. I was looking at my half, which was about one-third of an apple, then looked at her two-thirds of an apple and said to myself You really are a nutbag.

I won’t repeat any of the racist slurs she often spewed.

For three decades, I watched my grandmother torment my mother. My mother told me horror stories about her childhood, and I believe them. Mom had one of the shittiest, most abusive childhoods you can imagine. So, yes, she’s a little neurotic as an adult.

But she is not at all abusive, quite the opposite.

I have never wanted for love. Mom showered my sister and me with love to the point it was almost annoying. “Yeah, I get it, Mom. You love me, but now you’re embarrassing me.” I always knew from my earliest days that, no matter what, Mom had my back.

And yet, when she became pregnant for the first time with my older sister, there was panic. My mom dreaded she would be like her own mother and perpetuate a cycle of abuse. She spoke of this to her doctor, who gave her some simple yet poignant advice: “The suffering you’ve endured can be undone by loving your children with all your heart. Think of what your own mother would have done, and do the opposite.”

The advice sounded good but did not resonate. The fear remained.

Later, at home, she felt my sister kick. My mother told me of feeling the growing child inside her. She believed the kick was a message saying, I am here, and I need you. Even though my sister was not yet born, my mother realized in that instant she loved her in a way she had never loved another person before.

Her heart soared.

In a moment, she knew she would never be like her own mother. Down to her core, she was certain she would be the most loving and caring mom she could be. And she has been.

I’m not crying. You’re crying. Shut up.

Such a sensation, in which you achieve total clarity of purpose in an instant, qualifies for the word “epiphany.”

No matter which way epiphany manifests, you must listen. It’s the path to a better life.

Speaking of a better life, my mom didn’t let her upbringing hold her back. She earned her corner office in a male-dominated industry, becoming a business juggernaut celebrated in the community. What’s more, she took a near-impossible high road with her own mother, continuing to look after her rather than write her off. She even forked out for a nice nursing home when the old bat lost the last of her marbles.

The lesson is this: The circumstances of the first part of your life don’t have to define the second part. No matter what transpired yesterday or the days preceding it, this does not determine what happens on neither this day nor the days yet to come.

No one makes it through life without scars. Some are visible, like the one on my knee; others reside below the surface. Sometimes change happens fast via epiphany. Sometimes it takes years and baby steps. Change is inevitable, but you’re the one who influences the direction such change will take.

If you’re tired of the path you’re on, you can switch to a new one. They’re your feet, and you have the freedom to place them where you choose. A quantum leap of inspiration to change your path does not mean you lack liberty. Just because your new way forward has become irresistible does not mean you have sacrificed self-determination. Rather, your heart and mind being united in what feels right is what gives epiphany its power to push you.

When you feel such power, it means you are about to fulfill your destiny.

Off the Quantum Deep End

The word “quantum” is being increasingly used in health circles to the point that it is almost considered to be pseudoscience.

What I am about to write is not pseudoscience. It’s Einsteinian science. And other kinds of real science. Quantum has been a real science thing for a long time and it’s still a real science thing.

Ironically, I chose a science-fiction author to explain it to me.

Digital Decision-Making

The first time I met Rob Sawyer, I was worried he was about to die. Being we were not yet friends and that I am sometimes selfish, my initial concern was how this affected me.

Rob is a Hugo Award–winning science-fiction author. Early in 2005, I registered for a weeklong science-fiction writer’s workshop at the Banff Center in the Rocky Mountains, to be led by Rob and taking place in September of that year. I’d read Rob’s work and seen his photo on book jackets, and when I met him at a book signing four months prior to the workshop, he looked nothing like I expected.

He’d lost a lot of weight. So much so I was concerned he had a terminal disease. My baser self worried that if he died, there would be no workshop.

But Rob was happy and energized, and the workshop was a great experience that led to us becoming friends. The first book of his I read was titled Factoring Humanity. I recall the main character created a “quantum computer” that could process infinite calculations per second because it operated in multiple dimensions, or parallel universes, or something.

Now you know why I wasn’t cut out to be a science-fiction author.

In addition to being a best-selling author (one of his novels, Flash-Forward, became a TV series on ABC), Rob is a sought-after speaker and futurist because of his ability to communicate complex scientific phenomena in lay terms. At the time of our conversation on the nature of quantum leaps, Rob was putting the finishing touches on his twenty-third novel, serendipitously titled Quantum Night. The fact that Rob had his own epiphany, which led to dropping a third of his body weight, a loss he has sustained for over a decade, makes his insight even more relevant. But before discussing his personal story, we spoke of the true, scientific meaning of the word “quantum.”

“Most things in life go along in an analog wave; they go up and they go down and they change gradually and continuously,” Sawyer said. He explained, when it comes to losing weight, the motivation for most is like that analog wave: sometimes it peaks, such as when the high school reunion is coming up, and other times it bottoms out, and the only desire is to braid one’s ass into the couch and shove Doritos down one’s neck.

With quantum cognition, however, there is no wave. “Quantum is not analog,” Sawyer said. “It’s not wavelike. It’s digital. It’s either on or off. It’s either this or that.”

This or that … these are the same words I heard from Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen, who we’ll hear more from later, when he spoke to me of battling his addiction. After a struggle with alcohol, Collen suddenly quit drinking at the age of twenty-nine. “It was very black or white,” Phil said of quitting. “I knew I had to go this way or that way.” (Note: It can be dangerous and even deadly to suddenly quit substances such as alcohol as well as benzodiazepines, more commonly known under names such as Valium, Xanax, and Ativan. Consult a physician.)

To reveal the science of the quantum leap, Sawyer went down to the atomic level. “We talk about the quantum leap of an electron, going from a lower energy state to a higher state.” Sawyer explained that this doesn’t mean an electron travels to that higher state the way a mountaineer ascends Everest. It’s not step-by-step. It means the electron has gone instantaneously from the base of the mountain to the peak, bypassing all the intermediate steps.

Quantum leaps can also take place with human motivation. The base of the mountain represents having no desire to work toward a change of behavior, and the peak indicates a strong and ongoing drive to do all the things being a new person entails.

The traditional models of behavior change, as already discussed, involve climbing the mountain one step at a time. But a quantum leap takes a person’s motivation right to the top. You are facing a mountain. You stand at the bottom. Peak motivation—your ultimate ability to do the work with inspired vigor—resides at the top. You can climb to that peak one step at a time (where there is risk of slipping and sliding back to the bottom anywhere along the route, but especially at the beginning), or you can step inside a Star Trek–style transporter device and materialize at the summit.

If you can locate such a transporter and figure out how to make it work, is it not worth giving it a shot if it means you get to bypass all those steps?

This does not mean the traditional model of slow-and-steady behavior change isn’t sometimes worthwhile. This isn’t one of those books filled with the Truth that “they” don’t want you to know about. The reality is that millions have changed their lives via psychological baby steps, whereas many others achieve sudden change. And some people have experienced both types.

My friend Paul Ingraham, a health writer in Vancouver, has gone through three major behavioral changes in his life. Two of them were in the traditional linear fashion he called “forced marches across a tipping point; one desperate, determined step at a time.” The other was via epiphany, which he described as “Way easier, completely irresistible. To have it was to change, no work required. Just *Poof!* I’m different now.”

“Forced marches across a tipping point.” This is an apt description for what most cognitive-behavior-change models are built around. But it doesn’t always work that way.

I do not wish to dismiss decades of work by respected psychologists in the baby-steps approach to change, because it’s a valuable tool that can be used to lead to epiphany. As I mentioned previously, look at the case of Lesley the fencer. She forced herself to struggle along for a couple of months, then came the poof Paul referred to. Same with my own physical transformation; I did not enjoy the first two months of battling to adopt an exercise regimen.