The Question That Has Been Asking You

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.

What it actually looks like to live a question

Several practical observations:

You stay with it long enough for it to deepen. Most adults dismiss their deepest questions before they have actually engaged with them. The question arises; the discomfort begins; the question is rationalized away or replaced with a workable substitute. The work of living a question begins with not doing this — letting the question stay open, returning to it, allowing it to deepen.

You write it down. A journal kept across years that returns to the same questions reveals patterns and movements you would not see in scattered moments of reflection. The journal is not for resolution; it is for tracking the slow movement of inquiry.

You bring it into therapy or contemplative practice or both. A question that is held only by you, alone, often does not move. A question that is held with another — therapist, contemplative teacher, intimate partner who can hold it — often does. The witnessing matters.

You make small experiments rather than big decisions. When you have a question about your career, you do not have to quit your job and start over. You can experiment in small ways with what your relationship to your work could be. The experiments inform the question.

You let your life respond to the question rather than imposing answers on your life. The information you need is in your life — in what energizes you, what depletes you, what you are drawn to despite yourself, what you avoid despite yourself, what your dreams keep showing you, what your body keeps telling you. Living the question means listening to this information rather than overriding it with what you have decided you should want.

You hold it across time. Some questions take years. The question of who I am beneath the role I have played has, for many of my clients, taken a decade of attention. This is not failure. This is the timescale of the actual work.

When the answer arrives

What I have seen happen, when clients live their questions with sustained attention over years, is something hard to describe. The answer arrives, often, not as a revelation but as a recognition. You realize, looking back, that you have been gradually becoming a person who already lives the answer. The question has not been solved; it has been outgrown.

A client who came to me years ago asking what is my actual vocation did not, ever, have a moment of clarity in which the answer revealed itself. He spent six years living the question — making small adjustments, turning down certain opportunities and saying yes to others, paying attention to where he came alive and where he went dead. Six years in, looking back, he could see that he had been steadily building, without quite intending to, the work that was the answer. The answer had not been waiting somewhere to be found. It had been built, slowly, by the living.

This is what living a question can do.

What we offer

Therapy at Baraka is, at its deepest, a place where the questions that have been asking you can be held. Not solved on a timeline. Held — with skill, with patience, with the company of someone who can stay with you while the work that wants to happen happens.

If something has been asking you, and you are looking for company in living it, please consider working with us.

• Book a free 15-minute consultation → Or call (236) 455-6306 Email contact@barakaocc.com