Letters to a Young Poet

[lillibet]

There's been a "what's the best advice you've ever gotten" meme going around my f-list and this morning Jane Fonda posted the following in her blog.

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves.
Don’t search for the answers,
Which could not be given to you now,
Because you would not be able to live them.
Live the questions now,
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer”

Rilke “Letters to a Young Poet”

Comments

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

so. not. my. thing.

i'm over 40. the only things i've gotten in my life, i've done the getting. the only thing that 'be patient and wait' is going to get me is old age.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I don't think it's talking about accomplishments and stuff, so much as "If you don't know the answer yet to 'What is the Meaning Of My Life?', that's okay."

[spwebdesign.livejournal.com]

I don't believe anywhere the poem says "be patient and wait." On the contrary, it exhorts the reader to live, which is always an active state. It simply advises that one should explore the questions. Live the questions, not the answers. The search for answers would be fruitless, as the answers will only appear when you have done enough to find them. And living to find answers is seeking complacency. Instead, he suggests, explore the question, live life to the fullest, don't cease to be curious, and whatever answers you may have thought you needed so desperately will appear.

Of course, Rilke wrote in a time and place where men especially simply didn't grow very old, kept getting mowed down in their prime, so his outlook on life quite understandably will differ from ours. He must have felt life is too short to waste it seeking answers/complacency. He must have understood that life is in the journey, not the destination.

[dpolicar]

I am pleased with myself for recognizing this passage as Rilke. For which particolor, somewhat obscurely, gets the credit.

As you might imagine, it's a passage that really resonated with me when I first read it. This idea of some questions being best approached by "living the questions" in order to "live your way into the answers" is, I think, importantly true. Somewhat similar to your notion of "swimming lessons," I think.