❓The Questions Themselves

Answers. We spend our lives in search of them. We are desperate for them, so desperate that we embrace slipshod shortcuts that allow us to circumvent the work we ought to put in to arrive at those answers. To cut right through it and get to the end as fast as possible, ignoring the scaffolding we'd have been wise to build.

But what of the questions themselves?

Take a moment — a quiet moment, if you can find one — to read this passage from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, which comes from a collection of letters he wrote to a mentee:

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, 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.

I found this passage recently and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It resolves, in its own way, a tune I've been humming for quite some time.

My favorite question, "what makes you, you?" matters in part because it is impossible to answer in its entirety. Any response you may give is incomplete, because there are infinite pieces of you and ways to interpret them. And to the extent you believe you do have a complete answer, I'd reply, dear reader, that you're not digging deep enough.

The question itself matters, as does the hard-earned realization that there's often no neat solution on the other end of the equation. It is the unresolved matters of the heart, combined with the inescapable fact that life is finite, that lend meaning to existence. To try to have patience with those matters, as Rilke implores, is no light charge.

Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

As I raise two young boys, I think of them as I reflect on this passage. Whatever answers I believe I have about the world are colored by my experience and the depth of who I am. I could share with them what I currently understand, but even that wouldn't make sense given their stage of development. Like my father before me, I will teach them lessons along the way, but it will take maturity and lived experience to actually grasp answers of their own.

So, too, must I be patient in discovering the answers to questions I currently ask. Even if someone has an answer I desire, I may not be able to yet fully wrap my arms around it.

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.

I'm reminded here of the most basic disciplines of harnessing attention, like avoiding the temptation to fill every nanosecond of the day and night with some type of stimulant. To leave the phone on the table and take moments of "boredom" to observe and process the world and think. To live everything means living even those less energetic moments. And also giving space for the hard and painful moments, understanding that there are questions on life that fundamentally cannot be resolved right now.

In time, Rilke suggests, we may indeed live our ways into the answers.

And then again, we may not. Some questions may never have satisfying answers. Perhaps those are the most meaningful, and worthy of love, of all.

Yours, questionably,
-Rye

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