Sometimes you enter into those seasons when the day-to-day things lurch towards a standstill. Internally, there is a Pause. You keep moving, you keep working, talking, eating, playing with the dog. But in your inner-self there is a suspension. This Pause can feel violent – as though you have been walking in a crowd and someone slams into you. Stunned you pull back. What just happened? Other times, the pause can feel gentle, like a hand patting a seat, beckoning you to sit down for a while.
The phrase “Live the questions” has come to my mind in this gentle Pause. I want to accept the invitation to sit and listen to what is being asked of me.
The exhortation “Live the questions” comes from Letters to a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s a collection of letters between Rilke and Franz Xaver Kappus, a 19-year -old military cadet. Kappus writes to Rilke asking him, among other things, to critique his poetry and give him advice about whether to pursue life in the military or follow a literary career. Each time Rilke refuses to give him concrete advice. Instead, Rilke tells him that he doesn’t need literary critiques but that he must be true to himself – that he must “go into himself”. And the most enigmatic and well-known reply to Kappus in this correspondence is to simply “live the questions”. Rilke writes;
“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and 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.”
It must have been frustrating for Kappus to receive those replies from Rilke. He wanted answers, he wanted direction in his life. But Rilke’s responses are slippery. They bypass the concrete as though this didn’t matter much and nestle in the realm of uncertainty.
There are moments in our lives, the Pause, these liminal spaces, when we feel as though we are falling. We get that queasy feeling in our stomach; the same as being on a dizzying ride in the amusement park. We reach for something to hold onto, the safety rail perhaps, and our fingers tighten. We don’t scream because that would be useless. And too many people would notice. Instead we must wait until it’s over. Uncertainty can feel like that. We think, if we could just find the concrete answers to the questions occupying our minds, all would be well.
The encouragement “Live the questions” calls me to let go of this need for certainty. Instead I want to find my home in the midst of uncertainty. I want to pluck out those questions residing in my mind, hold them up to the light, take a closer look, turn them around, observe them and be curious about their emergence. And then I want to think about what the right or good question is to ask. Often the questions circulating within have a demanding tone “When will I know…?” “How can I get to …?” “What do I do about…?” They can be too sharp and impatient.
The questions I’m thinking about sound softer and more appropriate for this gentle Pause. They are indirect. “What does it look like if..?” “Why am I feeling..?” The tone is curious and tinged with wonder.
During a Pause, to “live the questions” means to not only make my home in this uncertainty and to be free from the expectation of immediate answers. It’s also an opportunity for those questions to be transfigured and reimagined.
And this takes a bit of skill because we are used to questions that elicit a direct answer – to get results, outcomes and solutions in a busy, time-poor society. A direct question will often receive a direct answer. Yet Rilke knew how to artfully dodge Kappus’ pointed questions in a way that could perhaps help him see his yearnings from another perspective. Maybe Rilke was nudging Kappus, that he was asking the wrong questions. And if you ask the wrong questions you will get the wrong answers. I wonder what might have become of Kappus if Rilke had responded to him directly, giving him the advice he longed for. Would that have satisfied him?
The questions I’m asking in this iteration of the Pause feel much too direct and demanding. They are looking for timeframes, outcomes and a future that I can control. So instead I will try to live the questions and make this moment of uncertainty my home, however long it lasts. But I will also gently interrogate these questions occupying my mind. I will play with them like clay until they morph into questions that brim with a curiosity that will nourish my soul.
Rev. Dr Karina Kreminski, Mission Catalyst – Formation and Fresh Expressions, Uniting Mission and Education. Karina also blogs at An Ordinary Mystic.
