Live the Questions

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 in the future,

you will gradually,

without even noticing it,

live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet