Live Your Questions

Live Your Questions

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you so much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, and like books, that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to love everything. Live the questions now. 

Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Marie Rilke                                                                                                                     Letters to a Young Poet                                                                                                                      

  Cited in Prayers for Healing

This favorite piece of heartfelt advice has a long history with me… and in me… 

While I am sure that I had encountered it earlier, what I can recall is discussing it in my classes in psychotherapy, and then again, in a pastoral counseling seminar some decades later… It remains a cornerstone of guidance, both for me, and for my coaching work, as its depth of meaning remains cogent and convincing, supportive and encouraging.

I have read it in a variety of ways… as questions unsolved, and as questions unresolved, and depending on my situation or challenge in life, both approaches have held revealing merit.

To love the questions… or at the very least respect them, is to take them seriously enough to never discard or disregard their potential importance for you. As I understand it, one of the marks of spiritual maturity and growing wisdom is to allow questions to marinate in you; holding them deliciously, and then to be content that the answers will come when they are ready, when they have ripened, and well seasoned by our taste and our trials of life or living.

Trying to force a conclusion, or being impulsive and headstrong in one’s attempts to satisfy or accomplish an answer, is at best will leave it incomplete; and maybe could even prove itself harmful to the necessary depth and dimensions of soul the question has been designed to answer for you!