I have learned that much of what drives me forward in this world are the unanswered questions...It also keeps me awake at night when I feel that certainly I should have the answers. Many years ago I was introduced to a great book...Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. He had many beautiful passages in this small book of wisdom one in particular has stayed with me. Rilke wrote to his young poet friend:
“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 answers, which could not be given now … the point is, to live everything. Live the question now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
I love these words...I also marvel at how many answers I have actually lived into. I am also struck that I still have so many questions to live into.
So ladies what questions are we all living and what answers have we lived into?
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Beautiful!
ReplyDeleteThanks Nancy!
ReplyDeleteThis has been a hard one for me to put into words. Not because I have so many questions about myself right now, other than the, "will my daughter find happiness in her relationships', or, "will my son ever have the independent life away from us where he can grow and flourish?" (He has multi diagnosis} Those are my two most pressing concerns which create the questions in my day to day life. My husband and I have certainly lived through the question of "How are we going to do this" while raising a child with so many behavioral issues and unknown challenges and struggles, and we did live through that question. That was "THE" question for many years. It has been answered up to this point. Dan is a wonderful young man and being able to live through that question got him to where he is now. I guess I probably have many questions to realize and live through. I live a more "one day at a time" life, and the questions seem simpler. Maybe once I get to a place where I can actually focus my attention on my own personal questions, I will have a better answer.
ReplyDeleteMy questions are: what is existence? what is the meaning of life? what does being truly present and egoless feel like? what is dying like? what is smaller than an atom (or a particle or whatever the smallest known thing is)? what is behind reality -- there is air and forms and stars and shit -- what's behind all that? are we cells in a huge body? can I truly sense that everything is the same without drugs? what is nothingness? And some more along that vein.
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