Living the question

Isn’t it funny how sometimes an unexpected encounter points you into a certain direction and once you follow the prompt it brings you one step closer to whatever it is you just happen to be looking for, even or especially if it is an answer? This is what happened when katmcdaniel from Synkroniciti commented on my last post. I tend to look up new visitor’s blogs out of curiosity and curtesy and am glad I did so this time, too. Otherwise I would have missed this beautiful Rilke poem she had just posted.

I beg you, 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, Letters to a Young Poet

This really resonated with me; returning readers will very well know, why. I’m currently harboring a whole lot of questions about that untouched territory of 2017. However, the answers are not showing up. Just yet, I tell myself. But at least this poem did and nudged me towards a semi-answer.

I find it very appealing – if you exclude the ‘perhaps’ and ‘far in the future’ bit, that is. Not to my liking at all, this part. In fact, I do hope that I have already done my fair share of living the questions in the last few months, and hopefully this will have taken me substantially closer to living into the answer, very certainly so, and sometime very soon.

Until I do, gradually and without even noticing (wouldn’t that be nice?), I will keep enjoying the poem as a beautiful reminder that the really good stuff takes time to ripen, and spend my time trying to love my questions as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. The idea is certainly more intriguing than the restless, exhausting chase I usually tend to embark upon whenever I can’t figure something out.

Speaking of Synkroniciti, or synchronicities: I also googled the poem (yep, oops, first brief relapse into searching) and stumbled upon this beautiful song by a talented young singer-songwriter. Gorgeous voice and lyrics, I find. Guess who it was inspired by?

me

Feature image © Pixabay/ElisaRiva

#ForgivingFridays