Live the Questions

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What question, if any, have you asked/chased for years with no semblance of a coherent answer? How have you carried it? Where does it weigh on you, and what does this cost you in energy and other ways?

I attached the quote below by Rainer Maria Rilke in my last post of 2025, as part of ‘what’s on my mind.’ I asked Shane and AJ to read and reflect on it, and they both responded so kindly and generously. I have listened to each of their messages repeatedly and shared them with friends when the concept of patience with unanswered questions arises. Rilke was only in his thirties when he wrote these Letters to a Young Poet–I think Franz Xaver Kappus was in his twenties–and already such deep and wise understanding of his own and our shared humanity! The often quoted ‘live the questions’ part has resonated with me for many years, and now hearing the reflections of people I admire, then inviting others to listen and ponder together, I gain exponentially more. Of course!

I had said for a while about my inner work: “I have done all I can do with shovels; now I need drills.” Patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that recur lifelong, not necessarily negative, but interesting and somewhat perplexing, poke at my consciousness. I just want to figure it out, to understand. So I engage with books, thearpy, coaches, and of course my wise and thoughtful, loving friends. I’ve learned and grown so much along the way, and yet the mysteries persist. I feel impatience, frustration, and wonder in turns.

But last week, listening to AJ’s response once again, Rilke’s words sunk in another layer: Live the questions. Live my way into the answer some distant day. My last post discussed weeks of hamster wheeling and distress, wondering about myself and the other person, our relationship, the wierd feelings and my reactions. What if I had just held it all more loosely and lived those questions, rather than chasing answers? Could I have suffered a little less? Gotten to peace or epiphany sooner? Living the questions is a mindfulness practice. Be with what is, with neither judgment nor resistance. Flow with it; let it show me in its own time. I like that. I can practice it.

My mantras for presenting my authentic self saved me at the last minute before meeting that person again. I can now add ‘live the questions’ and maybe pull on it more effectively in real time. It can center and ground me in ‘the magic in the in between,’ as AJ says, to maintain openness, wonder, and curiosity ahead of anxiety and insecurity about my innermost mysteries. Because despite those particular unknowings, I actually know myself well. I have clarity about my values, goals, boundaries, and integrity. I have all the support I need from loved ones to help me process and hold me accountable to all of these. So I can relax, breathe deeply and slowly, keep walking, and trust myself.

What passages, pieces of art or music, or other things do you visit often, that continue to nourish your being and help you grow each time? Our favorite books, movies, songs, poems, paintings, photographs, etc–they do this for us, no? When we share them with others, our perspective grows yet wider, we live bigger, and even if we don’t arrive at answers, the questions get sweeter, I think. How wonderful. So let’s just keep living them.

Worpswede, near Bremen,
16th July, 1903.
Here, where a mighty land is about me, here I feel that no human being can answer for you those questions and feelings which have a life of their own in the depth of your heart, for even the best use words wrongly when they want to give them the most delicate and almost inexpressible meaning…
If you attach yourself to Nature, to the simple and small in her, which hardly anyone sees, but which can so unexpectedly turn into the great and the immeasurable, if you have this love for what is slight and try quite simply as a servant to win the confidence of what appears to you poor, then everything will become easier for you, more uniform and somehow more reconciling, not perhaps in the understanding, which holds back in amazement, but in your innermost consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge. You are so young, all beginning is so far in front of you, and I should like to beg you earnestly to have patience with all unsolved problems in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, or books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not search now for the answers, which cannot be given you, because you could not live them. That is the point, to live everything. Now you must live your problems. And perhaps gradually, without noticing it, you will live your way into the answer some distant day. Perhaps you actually have in you the possibility of moulding and shaping, as a particularly blessed and pure form of life; train yourself in it—but take what comes in complete trust, and, as long as it comes from your own will, from some need or other of your inner self, then take it for itself and hate nothing…
…All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and my confidence is with you.
Yours,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
Translated by K.W. Maurer
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. K.W. Maurer. London: Langley & Sons. The Euston Press, N.W.I., 1943 (public domain) https://rilkepoetry.com/bibliography/

DIY Pep Talk

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“Wait, I have mantras for this!”

How are you affected by anxiety, rumination, or otherwise tenacious yet counterproductive thoughts and feelings in life? Many of us lose sleep. We lie awake, before falling asleep or having awoken at night, or both. I talk with patients about this regularly, a common problem that manifests for each of us in our own unique way.

Recently a patient mentioned it to me during a routine visit. After decades of stress-induced insomnia of various causes, there was a sense of placid acceptance in his tone and posture, and also hope that he may still find a way to overcome. He listed some prior life stressors, none of which had turned out nearly as badly as he had ‘unncessarily worried.’ He said when he remembers this, he is able to de-escalate in general, but it doesn’t necessarily help him at night. Since meeting me he had also been practicing box breathing to relax and calm his nervous system, which sometimes helps him sleep. So we agreed he could try to combine the two when insomnia hits: Breathe intentionally and rhythmically while repeating a reassuring, de-escalating mantra of his choosing. I’m excited to hear how this goes for him.

For some months I had been ruminating on and off about friction in a longstanding relationship. I journaled, spoke to multiple friends, and also lost sleep, which happens to me rarely. I entertained exiting the relationship altogether, but that was neither justified nor productive. I saw it as a personal challenge to walk my talk of showing up, sticking with it, and being my best relational self, despite feeling unappreciated and disrespected. What other story could I tell about this person and our relationship? The day before an upcoming encounter I felt almost squirelly from anticipation and ambivalence about how to approach the meeting. Then it hit me: I have mantras for this.

  1. I’d rather regret being too kind than not kind enough.
  2. Strong back, soft front.
  3. Do no harm, take no shit.

And just like that my conscience cleared, fight or flight turned off, and dread transformed into optimistic anticipation. I marvel still at how I recite my mantras everywhere to patients, on this blog, in social media posts and comments–I have even made stickers of them–and yet they escaped me when I needed them in a period of distress. I am all about relationships and yet this one flummoxed me–significantly. The mantras saved me–better late than never, and even better just in the nick of time!

I can neither prove nor disprove, but I tell the story that because I presented with honest equanimity and humbly confident professionalism, the encounter went smoothly. The relationship might even have improved? …I can’t say. I think I generally show up this way by nature and practice, but this time I had to talk myself into it. So I wonder, in all these years of friction (at least on my side) in this relationship, how much was actually mine to own, or in my imagination? This dynamic is definitely an outlier, so I don’t want to fixate on it; yet sometimes the exceptions point to areas of deeper potential insight and learning, no? Regardless, I’m grateful for how this episode has illuminated a new awareness for me and sharpened my attention to my own default attitudes and assumptions.

So what are your DIY pep talk methods? How did you come across them and why do they work so well? What mantras hold you up?

Happy Sunday, friends. Have a great week!

Recipe for Friendship

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At Loba Pastry and Coffee in Chicago: “Honey ~Squiggle~ Things” and “Fancy (ask for flavor)” pastries. It doesn’t matter what you get here, friends. You simply cannot go wrong.

Happy 19th day of National Card and Letter Writing Month!
Happy 11th Anniversary to Healing Through Connection!
Happy 100K+ total views on this blog in these eleven years–and thank you to all the humans who have viewed, commented, and followed all this time!

Today’s NCLWM prompt is Recipe. What is your recipe for deep, meaningful friendship?

Last weekend I communed with Phara, Christine, Heather, and Grant.
This weekend it was Donna, Jacob, Amber, Kasey, Troy, and James.
Holy cow, I am the luckiest person in the world to know so many amazing people and have the privilege to call them friends.

Donna cut through months of circular rumination and clarified the core of my mental and emotional struggle with one particularly vexing patient relationship. She and Jacob both helped me solidify ideas, structure, and themes for Book. Amber taught me about her generation at work and what it means to be a software engineer. And Kasey, Troy, and James just filled my tank the way they always do–sitting at brunch with them today made me wonder about and attempt to articulate my own Recipe for Friendship:

Ingredients:
–1 frontal lobe for Openness – enough to be willing to meet someone new
–1 or more Shared Interests – things over which we bond, in which we can grow together
–Many scoops Attention – each to the other, for both verbal and nonverbal communication
–Open faucet Curiosity – consistent interest in learning more about each other
–Demonstrated Common Ethos – core values that hold up our integrity in relationship with self and one another
–Consistent and regular Effort – demonstration that the relationship is worth our energy to cultivate and maintain
–When possible, In Person Contact – can substitute phone and video when needed; best results when added regularly
–Measured, in-context Vulnerability – key for depth and meaning
–Heaps and loads and oodles Love; impossible to add too much
–Time – no substitute, the more the better
–Trust and Devotion- will develop with Time, the last ingredients that occur spontaneously and multiply themselves, like strong sourdough starter

Method:
–This recipe can be made in any setting or context, at any time.
–Carry the ingredients on your person–mind and heart–at all times, ready when the opportunity to cook up a new friendship arises.
–Ingredients above are listed in likely order of occurrence, though most can be added at any time and then repeatedly, ‘to taste,’ in cooking/cultivating process.
–Additional ingredients of your choice encouraged, to personalize and make your friendships special to you and your friends
–Keep multiple recipes going at all times, each at various stages of mixing, stirring, rising, preheating, shaping, baking, simmering, braising, aging, cooling, etc.
–Even projects that have been apparently inactive for long periods may be self-sustaining without loss of flavor or nutrients, depending on stage of cultivation.
–Once a recipe is well underway, however, it will likely require regular additions of at least Attention and Effort to succeed over Time, depending on proportions and mixtures of the other ingredients.

This is a staple recipe. I cook by feel; as this is my first attempt at articulating my method, it will likely evolve if I keep trying to capture it in words. Now that I think of it, I could use sourdough starter as the whole metaphor, no? Oh well, maybe another time.
Everybody should have their own favorite friendship recipe–or maybe multiple ones!–on hand, written or not, like figuratively sturdy, dog-eared index cards with evidence of repeated use–stains, wrinkles, folds, and tweaks written in small cursive, legible only to the owner.
The strongest and most successful recipes are likely to be shared, mixed, and matched for additional depth of essence, character, temper, etc.–we all know the best loved recipes last the longest–often for generations.

My deepest and brightest thanks too all the friends who brought this forth for me today.
Love you all.