Questions

          "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 you will then gradually, without noticing 
          it, live along some distant day into the answer." 
                                                            - Rainer Maria Rilke

I came across this quote a couple of years ago when it was referenced in a book by Parker J Palmer that I was reading.  I found the quote very intriguing.  We humans generally like answers, and we find unanswered questions stressful.  We want to know what job to pursue, where to live, when something will finally happen that we are waiting for, and why things happen the way they do.

But many of the questions we ask don't have answers, or don't have answers yet.

Rilke encourages us to "live the questions" rather than always seeking the answers.  This might seem like a pretty abstract concept, but as I think about my internal dialogue, it makes more sense.  Whether we think of it as internal dialogue, talking to ourselves, or the "voices in our head", we all have a running audiotrack in our minds as we process the world around us, and this "self-talk" is often in questions.  These are the questions that we are living.

The author Parker J Palmer believes that it is important to examine the questions we ask ourselves.  He writes:

          "'How can I get through the day?' is not as promising a question as 
          'What truth can I witness to today?'  If we do not live good questions, 
          and live them in a way that is life giving, our own deformations will 
          permeate the work we do."
                                             -Parker J Palmer

The questions we ask influence our life. I have really been noticing this in my own life lately.  I've been pretty stressed over the last couple of weeks.  Sometimes life just feels overwhelming.  Here are a few of the questions that were going through my mind:

          When will I get a break?

          Why doesn't anyone care about how I'm struggling?

          What's the point of all this?

Those were the questions I was living.  I wonder how different those couple of weeks would have been if instead I had been asking:

          What changes can I make so I feel more rested and energized?

          Who could I ask to come over and hang out with me?

          How can I show my family that they are important to me?

The questions that we ask shape our life.  If one day we are going to "live into the answers" of the questions we ask, let's ask ourselves life-giving questions so that one day we may be living life-giving answers.