Six Sacred Questions · 03
When?
Put events in sequence. Timing can expose repetition, exceptions, escalation, recovery, and the difference between correlation and cause.
When? turns memory into a timeline. Under stress, separate events can collapse into “always,” “never,” or “everything at once.” A timeline gives the story edges again.
Ask when something started, how long it lasted, what happened immediately before and after, how often it repeats, whether the pattern is recent or longstanding, and where the exceptions are.
Before can establish sequence. It cannot, by itself, establish because.
What When? is not: a machine for proving causation. If one event occurred before another, that may justify a question. It does not automatically prove the first caused the second.
Where it gets distorted: memory compression. Three painful events over two years can feel like “constantly.” One recent event can make an old pattern feel current. Dates, messages, calendars, and contemporaneous notes can help reality-check memory when precision matters.
Use it under pressure: build a plain sequence before writing conclusions. Mark facts, uncertain dates, repetitions, and exceptions. Then ask what the timeline supports and what it still cannot tell you.
Guardian practice
Build the smallest useful timeline.
Choose one issue and write five points: start, before, event, after, now. Add only what you can reasonably place. Then circle anything you are treating as cause that the timeline only proves came earlier.