Living the questions

Lately, I’ve noticed so much more anxiety floating around.

Coming off of quarantine and grappling with how to venture back into the world, as well as the intense reckoning of racial inequality, has brought us back to one of the most difficult things to do:

Sit with the unknown.

photo by Vitae London

Like every Gate Passage does, this one forces us to sit with it and become better acquainted with the unknown.

As the world we knew continues to fall away, we are faced with more and more unknowns every day ... hence more anxiety. 

 If you’re feeling it, you are not alone. 

It ain't easy. We can be remarkably creative in how we side-step the unknown and our discomfort with it. Busy-ness, overdoing food and alcohol, over-committing are just a few.

Recently, I was grappling with the unknowns in my life with my own therapist (yep — this therapist goes to therapy and happily so). She asked me to look up and read a specific poem by Rainier Maria Rilke that she thought would help.

I found it.

I read it.

And she was right.

It gave me another way of thinking about all of the unknowns that I'm facing right now in my life.

Here it is … and as you read it, see what you notice in your body, your heart, in your thoughts, in your energy field.
  

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you 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.”

Notice anything?

Feel free to leave a comment below.

Meanwhile, here’s to living the questions.