LIVE THE QUESTIONS

Not only does not everyone agree with me, think as I think, believe as I believe, what is even worse is having to admit that I don’t have all the answers. I wish I did. Don’t we all? Perhaps even worse than not having all the answers is the fact that some of the answers we do have are in fact wrong. What we think is true is false and what we think is false is indeed the truth. Such is life as a finite and fallible creature.

     What we all have, then, are questions, questions seeking answers. Some of our questions are rather mundane and don’t weigh heavy upon us. And some questions weigh so heavily on us that they consume more than their fair share of our time and energy, much more than they should. And there are some questions for which we truly need to seek answers but are reluctant do so. For whatever reason we simply avoid the subject. And there are some questions that need answering but whose answers we are not ready to accept or cannot comprehend at the moment.

     This advice then from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “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.”

     Wonderful advice; unfortunately it is not always easy to follow. Living with unanswered questions is difficult. To compensate we often search for partial answers or somewhat satisfactory ones, ones that will do for the moment. We are reluctant to say “I don’t know,” or “I don’t understand.” But we must because we can spend so much time seeking an answer we are not prepared to receive anyway that we fail to live in the moment.

     Years ago I was single and very much alone and wanted to find someone with whom I could share the rest of my life and was searching high and low for that one person. I was getting nowhere and getting very impatient and said so to my brother. I said to him, “I’m tired being alone. When am I going to find someone?” His response: “Quit worrying. She’ll fall out of a tree.” Little did I know how correct he was. She did – the very next day!

     And I was ready to catch her, if you will. But I was not ready one or two years before, perhaps not even one or two weeks before even if I thought I was. The time had to be ripe and right; otherwise I would have missed her. That is the truth. But the further truth was that I had wasted a lot of time over the preceding years looking for that someone when I truly was not ready to receive her. As Rilke said, I had to gradually live my way into the answer whether I liked it or not, even whether or not I understood that I had to.

     We all have unresolved questions for which we seek answers. Many of those answers will simply “fall out of a tree” as we live the questions.

                                                            WJP