“I would like to beg you, dear sir, as well as I can, 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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903, from Letters to a Young Poet
Have Patience With Everything Unresolved
What’s most perplexing about life these days, is this overwhelming sense of limbo that most of the people I talk with feel. Everything is raw, ragged, confusing. There’s no sense to be made or found anywhere. It seems there aren’t answers to any of our burning questions. It is as though we are forever in flux, walking a dead landscape of uprooted trees, smashed cars, swollen rivers spilling their banks. We wander in neighborhoods of broken houses full of random (and often useless) belongings. An egg beater. A wheel. One lonely shoe.
Love the Questions Like Locked Rooms or Books Written in A Foreign Tongue
We want to feel some sort of solace, but there is none. There’s just a sense that everything in this wide world is shifting, but nothing has shifted, yet.
Live the Questions
And, perhaps, as Rilke wrote a hundred and ten years ago, we cannot live the answers. Yet.
So we must live the questions.
To me, this is what this particular time is all about. Living with this sense of foreboding. Living with the acid burn of negative potentials. Catastrophic climate change. The rapacious over-use of our natural world. The senseless killing of our own wildness, simply for the sake of killing.
We must live inside these terrible questions. These questions that make us ache, so we will become larger, more pliable, and more open.
Finding Our Way Into the Answers
We cannot solve the problems we face with the same sort of thinking that created them. We cannot be so certain of which path to take. We must all become beginners.
We are slowly cracking and breaking the outer shell (ego) in order to reveal the true. We have never been here before. We are brand new.
So, as I sit shaking in my boots and shitting my pants at the mere thought of all this change — of these paradigm shifts that are unseen in any lifetime before ours — I keep reminding myself, always be a beginner, always realize there is something to learn, always remember that you know far less than you think. Be a novice. Be a blank page. Be embryonic in your sense of yourself. You are just learning the steps. You are just starting out. It is OK to be stupid or blind or to not have the answers. It is OK to be wrong, to make mistakes, to muck it all up. This is all part of the process of becoming. Of enlightenment. Of living.
Love it all. The confusion. The mess. The raw, red rims of your eyes. Love the experience of being born. Love the experience of watching the old way of life, die. Watch everything burn. Watch everything go. Don’t be afraid. This. This is how you find your way. You don’t notice the changes as they come. You just wake up, one bright morning — sky the color of robin’s eggs — and you realize that you are there. And you open the door and smell the open air and say a prayer of profound thanks.
© 2013 Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved
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