“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
I first came across the above quote when I was in college. It spoke so loudly to me because I was really struggling with some uncertainties regarding my future... most specifically love drama. (What teenage girl is not plagued with a little love drama?? I was definitely no exception!) I had it taped beside my toilet paper roll... so that I could read it multiple times a day, often repeating to myself, "love the questions. live the questions." Today I came across the quote again, and I was amused, as seeing it again brought back so many memories. I was reminded of what the quote had once meant to me... I remembered how that I use to try and will (often unsuccessfully) myself to see my unknown future as a beautiful question, waiting to be answered...and I was pleased as I realized that in fact those uncertainties eventually did pan their ways into certainties.
And all is well.
Having survived my past uncertainties, and having seen that in the end all really is well, I feel more secure in my current and future uncertainties. And I almost enjoy them... Without even realizing it, I grew up to be someone who has come to really believe (and I hope live out!) the quotes I once only could TRY with very much effort to believe.
Live the questions. Perhaps then, without noticing it, you will live into the answer. I did. I really did. :)
