Living the Questions

"...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 locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. 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."-Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

A friend shared the above quote with me a few years ago and it has stuck with me. Life is hard, we ask questions, wanting answers now, but the answers can't always come now. In the process of waiting for things we're sometimes not even sure may come, living with a spirit of hopefulness can be difficult. But, like a building full of locked rooms, if we opened all the doors at once we'd have nothing left to discover, nothing left to learn.

The point is that if we can't live the questions, we can't have real answers. That's a hard pill to swallow for most of us. We want something that is easy, convenient, clean-cut. But life is messy, and there are no short-cuts on this journey. Living the questions means living with our hands open. Instead of grasping and grabbing, it means resting in the knowledge that waiting is (and will be) good for us, contrary to what our emotions might tell us.