Must I Write?

I've been mulling a bit over a few lines from Rainer Maria Rilke where he advises the young poet that he should become a writer only if he feels that he must. So, i've been asking myself, "must I?" At times, I feel paralyzed as a writer, unable to put pen to paper because I fear the vulnerability, or I fear the rejection of a piece not well received. As I sit at home over the holidays, though, I want nothing more than to retreat over a cup of tea and a good album and write. I want to watch movies and reflect on them. I want to muse over memories and spin them into allegory. I want to stare at a crackling fire for hours and then consider how to repaint the image with words.

In any other day and age, i'd probably have tried my hand at making a career out of writing. But that is scary, and troublesome in today's publishing world. Is the status of publishing an excuse for my own failure to step into the call of a writer further? Maybe. But maybe I should also give myself a little break.

Today, I was hit by this nugget: sometimes we must first unweave lies to find truth. In order to find our true selves, we must often first learn to recognize our false selves. And in order to discover our truest passions, we must often excavate the caverns of those that are not. Sometimes we must fully grasp the thing that we thought we wanted most deeply, only to realize that it wasn't the thing that would make us happy.

My mother has told me since I was a very young child that i've always been one who couldn't learn lessons from the advice of others. I always had to stick my finger into the pot of burning water first to believe it was boiling. I don't trust easily and when that trust is broken, it becomes even harder for me to live with arms outstretched instead of arms crossed. Things have marred me. My heart and my deepest self bear wounds from those who have hurt me. Likewise, they bear the pain from people whom I have hurt and let down through my own selfish nature and desire for control.

But, through a long and ongoing process of healing, these wounds have enabled me to become someone who can step down into the mess of others' lives and share hope. When we hear tales of hope from those who have suffered little loss, they often feel empty. I am learning that to be a writer, I must feel deeply. I must become expressive, not only of my own emotions, desires, and aspirations, but also those of my generation, and of my world. I must be able to relate, to empathize. I must feel the pain of broken communities, I must finger the wound of lost loved ones, I must shoulder the load of unmet expectations.

I am not alone in this, but the journey is necessary in order to become the kind of person who resonates as a storyteller. What this set of reflections means for me, I don't quite know, but for now it is better for me to write than to remain mute.

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.