Living the Questions

The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote to a young friend, begging him to "have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

I remarked to a friend some years ago now, that I wished I had been exposed to the knowledge in my 40s that I was discovering in my 60s. The answer I received was ‘Perhaps you did, but you weren’t ready for it then.’ This knowledge however has just led to new questions. Unfortunately, unlike Rilke suggests in her quote above, I have yet to find myself any nearer to an answer. Instead I find the questions themselves are proliferating.

In this society, questions are the poor relation, definitely not up there with the assured, confidence of KNOWING the answer. Indeed the very act of questioning can be seen to be a denial of the subject of the question. And so people are encourage not to question, but to accept what is, because after all, others know better than they. And that is a comfortable place to be..for awhile. It feels good to KNOW the answer, to KNOW your answer is the same as the others, to BE SURE you are fitting in with the group.

Feels good for awhile - that is until those pesky questions rear their ugly heads once again and this time won’t be so easily silenced. And then what do you do? Perhaps you try to silence those questions, to pretend they don’t exist. I know I did. (With little success, I should add.) Perhaps you just decided to ignore both the answers given as well as the questions, moving on to some other sphere in your life. I almost did that!

But then there is a third way to go. Follow the questions wherever they lead you. Go places where questions are permitted even if they are not always welcomed. Ask your questions and listen to the answers you get: answers both from within yourself and from others around you. Listen to these answers until you can perceive what resonates with you. These are the answers you can internalize. They won’t lead to a final answer but will lead you to new questions along your path.

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NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

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