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 sank another layer deeper: 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/