Living the Questions
Creative living means getting comfortable with space and silence. The writer facing a blank page, the artist before a naked canvas can feel fear (which closes) or excitement (which opens) and it is the same for you, for
whatever you are bringing into being.
The antidote to fear is patience. A willingness to settle into the blank space, and allow it to be. To take up residence there for as long as is necessary.
A willingness, as Rilke put it in his Letters To A Young Poet, to live the question rather than push forth an answer that is not yet ready to be:
“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.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903, in Letters to a Young Poet).
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Hi Dee,
You know what I think about school and its ways — often so removed from real creativity and learning. I hated history at school (battles and dates – yikes! yuk! – but now write novels that are steeped in history. Your instinct is right – there is nothing you can do here except give your daughter space and time. She’ll find her way.
Robin,
As always, your responses are so generous. For me, this has been the great advance of getting older. When young(er), I was very impatient. Now an open space, a place of uncertainty, seems like a great adventure. You’re singing my song on the noise pollution that surrounds us – everywhere – these days. I think we pull in noise around us because we’re afraid of what rises in us when we grow quiet. I know I was. But of course nothing drowns that out and then I found there was nothing to fear in the first place. The opposite. I too love the idea of “living the question”. Rilke is amazing, isn’t he? I commend this book (and his poetry, of course) to all who want to write — or who like read wise words.
I love your first line here…and all that follows. Very beautiful and so true. I think that is a key to rich deep living. We miss so much when we avoid space and silence. Many are very afraid of it and constantly fill every waking minute with doing and busy and noise and TV and Radio and all the rest. Space and silence seem almost extinct in comparison…but they aren’t. They are still there waiting for us with open arms. It is in space and silence that I get to breathe, slow down and just “BE”.
I also liked this line: “…live your way into the answer.”
For me there is nothing like life experience.
You are a gifted and beautiful soul. I am touched by all that you express. There is no doubt that you have really lived and it has made you wise and full of grace. So lovely.
With love and thankfulness,
Robin
Wow, I really needed to read this today! My 17 year old daughter is failing history, and I can’t seem to do anything about it. I am trying to stay calm. Thanks.