"Live the questions"

I’ve loved this concept of “live the questions,” thanks to the beautiful words of Rilke, since first hearing it in a Marginalian newsletter. It feels more playful, even more empowering, to hold the concept of, “live the questions” than to just “release the ‘how’,” (and trust).

“…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," - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet.

“Live the questions now… live your way into the answer.” And answers, plural, I would say. Because the way of life is many ways.

And, sometimes, the answers come without the questions.

I can choose fear, or I can choose trust

Yesterday, after I finished lunch, my mind started to take me to a place of potential future outcomes that very immediately felt scary. It pertained to something I was processing into a new understanding, a new reality, the other week. Through the waves, I had found—I have found—a wider stability, a deeper capacity to be in the now, rather than what if’s. Still, there are moments, and that’s OK. The voice that settled me as those frightening possibilities began to form as thoughts in my head, said, “You can choose fear, or you can choose trust.”

I choose trust. I chose trust in that moment, and I choose trust in writing right now. The reality is what it is; the rest, and me, is whatever I choose for it to be.

I trust my future self

I started saying this to myself, at some point back when I was in Brooklyn, as a way to come back to the now. To keep from falling into a spiral about a hypothetical future, from experiencing what I’ve sometimes heard referred to in the Vedic community as “future suffering”—suffering in the now (which was really a nice now, back then, and now, too!), mucking it up over a maybe.

“I trust my future self.” Even when I thought I wasn’t ready, for that big opportunity, that other thing I didn’t see coming, I really had been. I had received it, and I had come to believe in the innate rightness of it, even if it didn’t happen right away. I had a decades-long track record of things really working out. Future me deserved the trust of past me, and the now me. So, I let it go. Let her go.

As I started saying this to myself more, I was giving myself even more reason to believe. I’d go to add something to my Calendar and see it was already there. I’d open my phone to write something down, and it was done. I’d think of an email I meant to respond to, and I’d already sent it. Future me really didn’t need to prove anything else, but I guess she wanted to. Notes to self; jokes on me, and jokes for me. So, now I do more (less) to just let her be.

For Kelly, with whom I found deep trust in myself (we both did!) in those early and formative professional years, and with whom I formed a deep and formative friendship.