Live the Questions
I-Love and I saw a terrific movie this afternoon on Starz called “Thumbsucker” which was a coming of age film. Here’s a link for more on the movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318761/
Towards the end of the film, the young protagonist is talking with his orthodontist/spiritual mentor who was magnificently played by Keaau Reeves. Reeves, takes a long drag on a cigarette after just finished providing a dental cleaning to our young hero and then he says: “just pray you don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve got the answer. Because that’s bullshit.”
Our adolescent hero asks: “Then what’s the answer?”
Reeves responds: “The trick is to be able to live without the answer.”
I thought that was really cool. It reminded me of a favorite quote by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was writing to a young writer and also trying to provide some guidance on how to get through the difficult bits of life. Rilke said:
“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and 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. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train your for that -- but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything. “
I think that pretty much sums it up for me. Big answers never illuminate themselves when you want them. But if you continue to ponder, or live, the questions, you may eventually gain the wisdom that you had sought.