This picture doesn’t go with the writing in today’s blog. The scene isn’t a metaphor for life, or, if it is, I’m not seeing it the story in it yet. It is just a beautiful scene on a deeply cold winter day.
What is calling to me today is the Rilke quote from Letters to a Young Poet, about living the questions.
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and 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, 1903, from Letters to a Young Poet
What Rilke says is a match to my experience of life.
If you read my blog, you know that it is all about the questions. I am always asking myself questions and I always offer a question to you, in case it resonates with your soul.
I find it very freeing, that we don’t have to have the answers. And, even more, that we don’t have to strive or search for the answers. We don’t have to figure it out.
All we have to do is Live the Questions Now.
But, what does that mean? How do we do that? (I’ve always got a question!)
I think Rilke gives us a clue in his quote when he says “try to love the questions themselves.”
I love questions, but I think I could “love the questions” more. I could wake up in the morning with a question on my mind and just love that I have the question alive in me.
I could love that question like I love other things. I could fill my heart with love and gaze at it. I could love it, appreciate it, savor it. I could turn it over in my mind, delighting in every aspect of it. I could fill my heart with love and send it to the question.
That would be fun.
I think there is another piece living the questions, and that is to hold the questions with a light, playful spirit of curiosity.
And, to be ok with Not Knowing. That might be a little more challenging, in our culture. We are supposed to have the answers.
Some of the questions that are alive in me now are:
- What if it is all about Love?
- How can I live more tuned into my inner essence?
- What would it be to live my life from a grateful heart?
- How can I be more generous?
These feel like big questions. But, I don’t need to have the answers. All I need to do is to Live the Questions.
What are the questions that you are living right now?
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