On Questions, part 1.
On Questions, part 1.
Do you know this excerpt from Ranier Marie Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet? If so, do you remember how you were affected when you first read it?
“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to 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 you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
I was a little older than the 19-year-old young poet Rilke wrote those words to when I first read that passage. I remember the initial surprise and then the blessed relief the words brought me: Whaaaat? You mean life isn’t about knowing the correct answers? You mean it’s okay to not know?
It was like I received a License to Wonder. My first question was “I wonder what living the question even means?”
It wasn’t long after when the wisdom of the great hypnotherapist, Milton Erikson, was passed along to me through my studies with the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) folks, and later, Dr. Dawna Markova, who studied with him. Erikson celebrated the state of not knowing, uplifting it as a place where all possibilities live.
It was like I received a hall pass to hang out in the Confusion Room.
What if my questions – and I had a TON of them – weren’t problems to be solved, but interesting paths I got to wander along?
Hey, but wait! What about those questions that had me wondering about my worth and value, or led me wandering down dead-end paths overgrown with slimy thoughts, or those nighttime creepy crawler questions that kept me awake? I had plenty of those, too.
How can I love questions that feel like they’re out to get me?
I began to wonder what questions I could love and what questions I could welcome living within me for a while...or a lifetime.