One of the things that keeps occurring in a number of my professional coaching sessions is the question: “When is it ever going to be enough?”

You know what I’m talking about? It’s everything from the latest firearms violence to climate change challenges, difficulties with the political rhetoric in the country, and the like. People keep asking me, when is it ever enough? When do we cross the line? When do people change their minds collectively? What Malcolm Gladwell called the tipping point, that moment in which enough of something happens, that the change unfolds?

Well, I’ve got to quote a friend of mine from the recovering world, Bill, who loved to always say when we were talking about these things, “Let’s be honest, Ron, many of us simply can’t see the light until we have been burned by the heat of the light.”

Of course, there’s some truth to that, in the recovering world and in other places, we talk about hitting bottom or rock bottom. Now, the thing that’s amazing about this concept is that there is something about the psychology of each of us, you and me, our culture, people collectively, that until we reach this moment where the pain, or the difficulty, or the suffering is great enough, we just can’t let go of where we’re at whatever the status quo may be.

Now, people have said, “Well, dear God, Ron wasn’t it enough to see 170 people shot?” 

Well, apparently not because it hasn’t changed the paradigm.

One of the tragic things I’ve learned in the recovering world, which applies to this larger world, is it may take far more suffering than we imagine, before we finally reach that tipping point. 

It’s tragic. It’s awful. It’s unfortunate. But once you understand that nothing changes until we’re ready to be done with it, until we’ve crossed the line, hit the tipping point, all we can do is keep trying, keep praying if you’re a person of faith, keep doing what we can to change the course. Knowing that there’s always going to be a tipping point.