Overview
There is a passage in Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet that has, since I first read it as a teenager in Tehran, been one of the most useful things I have known in this work. He is writing to a younger man who has come to him with urgent questions about love and vocation and direction. Rilke does not provide answers. He says, instead, something more useful: be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves.
Live the questions now, Rilke writes. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. I have thought about this passage many times across the decades since.
Most of what I do as a therapist is help people stay with questions that cannot be answered quickly. Most of what depth- oriented work consists of is the slow living-into of answers that arrive only by being lived toward. The instinct most adults arrive with — to demand resolution, to find the answer, to know what to do — is, for the deepest questions, the wrong instinct. The questions that have been asking us are not asking for resolution.
They are asking for company while we live them. This article is about that. The question that finds you Most adults have, at some point, become aware of a question that has been with them for a long time. Sometimes the question is articulable.
Sometimes it operates below the surface, recognizable only by what it produces — the restlessness that does not have a clear cause, the dissatisfaction that does not yield to circumstance, the longing that does not know what it is for.
Some of the questions I see often
Who am I, separate from the role I have been playing-
- What am I actually here to do with the rest of my life-
- What kind of relationship do I actually want to be in-
- How do I live with this loss I cannot resolve-
- What am I afraid of, that I have been organizing my life around avoiding-
- What do I want, when I let myself want-
- How do I become a person I respect-
What is my relationship to the larger reality I am part of — God, mystery, the world, the cosmos, however I name it-
- What does my life ask of me- These questions are not solved by answering them, exactly. They are solved by being lived through. The answer is not the right belief; it is the changed person who emerges from the sustained engagement with the question.
Why this is hard Several reasons living a question is harder than answering one: The cultural script wants quick answers. We live in a context that values resolution, action, productivity. Living a question — sitting with it, returning to it, allowing it to shape you slowly — does not fit that script.
The pressure to skip past the question to a workable answer is constant. The unanswered question is uncomfortable. Holding a question that does not yet have an answer means tolerating uncertainty. Most of us are not trained for this. We try to make a decision, take a position, settle the matter — even prematurely — to escape the discomfort of not knowing. The wrong answer can take you far astray.
Many adults have arrived at midlife having answered the deepest questions of their twenties hastily — choosing the career, the partner, the location, the identity that seemed reasonable at the time — and now have to undo decades of life that was built on the wrong answer.
Living the question more slowly might have prevented this; it is also harder than what most of us could have done at twenty-five. The question evolves as you live it. A question you began with at thirty is not the same question at forty-five. The question itself has been working on you. The answer that finally emerges is to a question slightly different from the one you started with.