Living the questions

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet:

I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves. . . . For everything must be lived. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answer. 

When I was younger I was surprised when I got an answer to a question wrong. As I’m getting older, I’m sensing I don’t have as many answers as I once did and I suspect as time passes I’ll be surprised if I ever have any answers.

The knowledge and experience we acquire through life should hopefully humble our judgemental and know-it-all egos; and bring us to a place of ‘unknowing’ contentment where the mystery of Being permeates our daily life. When we surrender to the great mystery, we find a peace where striving ceases and the burden of succeeding and having answers melts away.

We try so hard to find the answers to a fruitful, peaceful and joyful life (both the present reality and imagined future). Much of our time is spent finding solutions or methods to ensuring success and happiness with as little inconvenience and suffering as possible.

We are living in an era of information overload. This causes so much confusion, anxiety and depression for all of us trying to make sense of it all.

“We cannot settle today’s confusion by pretending to have absolute and certain answers. But we must not give up seeking truth, observing reality from all its angles. We settle human confusion not by falsely pretending to settle all the dust, but by teaching people an honest and humble process for learning and listening, which we call contemplation. Then people come to wisdom in a calm and compassionate way. There will not be the knee jerk overreactions that we have in so many on both Left and Right today.”

The beauty of Divine reality is accessible to all and as the first beatitude says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” The stance of ‘unknowing’ finds the deep divine ‘knower’ within.