Metaphor Monday :: The Question is the Answer

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, says:

“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.”

Consider this. We are conditioned to seek answers to well-defined questions: Who Am I? What is my purpose? What will make me happy? How should I live my life?

Work is a process of cultivating uncertainty, nurturing it and using it to direct our actions. Life outside of work, too, requires the same navigation.

Can we live our way into the answers that we need? This requires that we give up our preoccupation searching for answer and being impatient with the questions that beset us.

We have to be ready to live these answers and this cannot be forced. It’s an organic process and one facilitated by mindful living. In fact, Rilke’s quote strikes me as a formula for mindful living — keeping an open mind, loving the world as we find it, engaging ourselves to the fullest.

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