When you don't have an answer

Dear You,

I’ve been fairly con-fuzzled by a question in the last few days.

I sent a message to a friend on FB and asked her thoughts.

I had a face-to-face with Colin to hash it out.

I sat with my own thoughts.

Do you ever do that?

Find yourself pondering something and the answer eludes you?

Here’s what Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke had to say about looking for answers:

From “Letters to a Young Poet”

“I beg you, 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.”

---

How are you with patience and not knowing?

As for me, it is work. I’m often in awe of people who take their time responding.

I tend to be quick with an answer and feel I’m right. (Which is natural, but can then be cluttered with Imposter Syndrome, regret, confusion.)

There’s consequences to quick wit.

And yet…

There’s no right person to be in the world. I am who I am.

Change is reality. “I am” is never fixed.

And there’s the space to be more of who I am. Infinite space.

And — with patience — I can love what I’ve been already.

What do you think?

From “Letters to a Young Poet”

Yours,

-mE

P.S. Thanks for reading. Feel free to share and to comment.