The first time I heard the phrase “Live the Questions” I was reading Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke –
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now 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.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
It has always stayed with me
I not only read this gorgeous quote but held it to me as something precious, nuzzled within its bosom as if it offered the deepest nourishment…
And it has.
Living the questions has altered my life.
Or, more accurately -Altared my life.
This practice is the process of cultivating a posture of deep curiosity, embracing a profound and faithful patience…that the unanswered is yet magnificent and holy.
Worthy of remaining precious in its unknownness.
It is a practice that switches you from being one who must know to one who seeks to know and loves the seeking no matter how long it takes to one who adores the questions themselves as portals.
Live and love the process in an Era where all says it is only the results that matter.
This way of being creates a richness of experience and a depth of life that remains with roots as deep as your heart even in the face of change and loss, uncertainty and chaos.
Ah my darlings if you are so courageous as to study this one quote.
To sink into its depths and let it have you…
To let it unravel within your psyche revealing the labyrinthine nature it possesses it will offer back to you the intensity of your own being and the beauty of your wonder
Live the Questions.
