Living the questions
I love this quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:
…Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Do not… seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will… gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
That seems to sum up so much of my life. Questions — about education, about nature, about faith, about marriage and parenting, about the future, about the past, about where and how to spend my life. They don’t really go away, though they do change form.
Be patient. Love the questions. Live along toward the answers.
5 Comments
Barbara H.
That’s hard. I tend to want answers asap. :-)
Amy @ Hope Is the Word
Brilliant, beautiful, and oh-so-true. Sometimes, there really just isn’t an answer, is there?
Polly
I have a devotional book titled “Living the Questions” so I had to go look at it and, in fact, she has the Rilke quote on the opening page! Cool. OK, and now leafing through the book makes me want(need) to reread it, it’s been a long time.
I think I have begun to have peace with questions that don’t get answers. I don’t feel confused or hurt or angry or impatient about them as much. They seem to be like invitations themselves.
Carol in Oregon
I love this, Janet. Rilke has been on my TBR list…forever.
Jess
I can so relate to you! Questions, questions . . . this quote has given me some comfort lately:
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.” — Bertrand Russell