The Best Advice

There was a time in my life - a few years back - when I was immensely frustrated because I could not discern what I was supposed to be doing to fulfill my role in this world and I couldn't figure out why I never felt completely happy - content. A wise friend pointed me to a little book written in the 1800's by Rainer Maria Rilke. The book was called Letters to a Young Poet, and was published on July 16, 1903 when the author was just 27 years old. To this day, I cannot fathom having had this kind of insight when I was 27. My favorite passage from the book, which was Rilke's advice to a wannabe poet, is as follows:

“I would like to beg you to 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 into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

I like this so much that I've included it in my first book, Forest to Fenix. I also read it to my students. Best of all, I try to live up to this wise counsel every day. How true is it that we are in such a hurry to figure things out that we forget to even ponder the questions to which we are so desperately seeking answers? Love the questions? What a concept. Acknowledge that things happen the way they are supposed to happen and in their own time. Realize that the answers come when we are ready for them, not when we want them...because we always want them.

Had I known 10 years ago that I would find a sense of peace and purpose as a college professor and a novelist, it would have been too soon for me to do anything about it. I realize now that it was the events in my life that left me most confused - most lost - that led me to where I am today. To have had the answers then would have been meaningless and I would not have been able to live them. Instead, I would have likely "course-corrected" and never found the path that was meant for me. At best, I would have hit a detour that would have led me to God knows where.

So, here is my advice and my plea: live the questions today. Trust that you will be one step closer to living yourself right into the answers you have always been too afraid to dream for yourself. Have faith. Have patience. Just live.

Any questions?