“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I found this in a used copy someone had left heavily annotated, question marks in the margins, whole paragraphs underlined. Someone before me had needed this badly enough to mark it up. I read it at my kitchen table on a night when I was trying, again, to force clarity about something that wasn’t ready to be clear yet.
The instruction to love the questions — not tolerate them, not manage them, but actually love them — felt impossible and also exactly right. I’ve been practicing sitting with uncertainty more like a companion and less like a problem to solve. Some days that works better than others. Not every question needs an answer this week. Some of them are just where you live for a while.