Rilke on Living the Questions

I love how Rainer Maria Rilke talks about patience. Rather than passive waiting, patience values pursuing whatever intrigues you with the assurance that what will be revealed will have been worth the work and wait required.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“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.”