Living the questions

What are we going to do now?

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Good morning, friends! It’s a lovely Saturday morning in April, and I woke up under my spring comforter with fresh air coming in my open window, feeling joyful and excited to see what the day will hold. Not only the day, but the coming days and weeks as well. I finished an after-school babysitting job yesterday that had been good, but increasingly difficult to do with a chronic leg injury I’ve had for the past few months. The job was supposed to go through the end of the school year, and I wrestled for months with whether or not to see it through, while I went to doctors and physical therapists, and stretched and did yoga and went swimming, all to no avail. The leg was just not healing, and I eventually had to accept that it wasn’t going to while I was taking care of kids.

I hate letting people down, and I really hate not living up to a responsibility, but thankfully the family was able to find another sitter, and I felt like I was able to end well. But the last couple of months I’ve been in a lot of pain, so it’s really a relief to be done. I’m done! Mark took me out for ice cream last night to celebrate and to make it seem real. Now I’m looking forward to being able to focus on healing, but I also find myself once again under-employed and looking for more non-childcare work. (Anyone need a social media manager?)

I’ve been thinking about the Rilke quote a lot lately, in terms of job-hunting, but also with some other life-decisions I’ve had to make lately. I try so hard to do the work of researching and planning, making lists of pros and cons, and making good decisions. But sometimes the information I have just isn’t enough to make a decision. Sometimes I can’t answer the questions that are unresolved in my heart just by thinking about them a lot. Sometimes I need to live the questions, to let my body sit with them for awhile instead of my brain. (Okay, technically my brain is a part of my body, but you know what I mean.) Get up, make coffee, go for a (short, limping) walk. Feel the morning air coming in my window. Let the various questions bounce around me like flakes in a snow globe until they settle on their own.

The Rilke quote is from his book, Letters to a Young Poet, but I think there is wisdom there which is relevant to people my age. Many of my friends are newly empty-nesters, or going to be soon, and feeling at loose ends. Others are single for the first time in a long time, or unexpectedly dating after a long period of singleness. There is a particular kind of confusion, a particular kind of fear, and also a particular kind of joy and freedom in remaking yourself in your forties. I think many of us weren’t ready to live the questions before, but we are now. We are beginning to recognize that the certainty of our youths wasn’t actual clarity, but rather fear of ambiguity. We’re more comfortable with ambiguity now. Not, like, entirely comfortable. But we recognize the wisdom that comes from not knowing. The answers that can only come from allowing ourselves not to have the answers. Not yet. Maybe someday soon.

“stand, bend, flow, change”
the husky wind is humming
“be not simply who you are
but who you are becoming”

from the poem, Bellingham, in my book, Open Things

I hope you can feel okay today, too, sitting with the questions.

Love,
Jessica

P.S. If someone you love is graduating this spring and you are looking for a unique graduation gift, might I humbly suggest one of my books?