I just shared my first poem by Rainer Marie Rilke a few days ago and now I find this passage from his book Letters To A Young Poet:
"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live with them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."
Oh, if only I had read that advice forty years ago. Would it have saved me some of the angst I was going through in those, half my lifetime, years ago? I doubt it. I probably couldn't have lived with the answers then. That last line has been more like it - experiencing at least some of the answers - in some distant day.
I have been reading some of my old journals, including the one I am holding in the photo above, and revisiting the almost daily seeking of answers to the unanswerable questions swirling in my life then.
What was it Mom used to say? "Time answers everything."
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