One of my favorite little books is Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” I’ve read it many times and regard it as one of the best books on inner reflection, creativity and love. Here’s one of my favorite quotes. Writing to the disquieted young student Franz Xaver Kappus he writes:
“I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, as if they were lock rooms or books written in a very foreign tongue. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Today we are sold ready-made 5 point self-help plans with the expectation that we can immediately find answers to what is ailing us and “fix” or “improve” ourselves like taking our car in for a repair or tune-up. Rilke suggests that deep inner work takes time and patience. That there’s no quick fix for nurturing and cultivating our lives. We need to take the time to sit down with ourselves and not be afraid or anxious when we explore our own unique mystery and find out that there are things that are “unresolved in [our] hearts,” and questions that we never asked ourselves before. Each of us will discover our own questions that pertain to our lives. If we try to answer them as quickly as possible, we may misunderstand the questions and come up with the wrong answers. And even if we do find the right answers, we may not be ready to live them, that is, accept them and structure our lives around them.
What Rilke is asking us to do is not easy. How do we “live the questions?” Think of your questions as seeds. Plant them in your soul, nurture them, and see what grows out of them. What flowers could be new beliefs and attitudes that can move your life in a totally different direction. The key is to be patient and let the questions naturally grow into answers, not forcing answers because we don’t have the time. This is hard to do. I like to “get things done” and complete projects as soon as I can. Living with the questions of my life was, at first, unsettling. But after awhile, my questions turned into answers. From these answers I figured out what I love, what I believe, and how I want to live my life. There are still more questions growing in my garden, but some of them have fully matured and borne much fruit. This can happen to you as well.
Live the Questions by Philosophical Living is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.