“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to live the questions themselves. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” Rainer Maria Rilke
This came in my email today. At 74, I hear it's familiarity...”Don't rush answers”...”Think through the question before you seek to answer it”.... “Have patience with yourself”, etc. We've all heard different versions of this basic thought process.
But to LIVE this process – throws a new wrench into this more bantered around way of giving ourselves yet another 'tool' in our life 'toolbox'. ”One can NEVER have too many 'tools'! Harbor Freight has this understanding down pat! Just ask my DH.
Ms. Rilke widens, deepens, gives this process more power to enable us to find our way in life. After all - “living”...is what we do in this life, right? RIGHT!
Reminds me me of an old Beatles song...”Let it be”...INDEED.
Maybe at times...we ARE our worst enemy as it were; maybe WE are the ones who place boulders in our paths, create the hill we cannot climb, make our life-plate too heavy, make our lives more complex and difficult to manage.
I've heard biblical quotes that speak to this process; to be STILL so that we can “hear” answers, be quiet enuf to understand how the “divine” in us is guiding. That – INMO, for me anyway, is why meditation is so difficult; that “monkey-mind” will not shut up! It wants to RUN through life, and we follow behind like perfectly performing little puppies! When any three of my cats jumps up on the computer table near my keyboard; I get wound up and attempt to gently push them away with accompanying LOGIC such as...”Please – not now – I am right in the middle of a thought”...or – “Not now, I'm on my bank line and you might step on the keyboard and mess something up!” What I am doing is missing THEIR moment - which COULD be mine - if I slowed down - LIVED instead of ran.
Then I recall Hugh Prather in “Notes to myself”; “I am holding my cat so it can sleep; what else is there!” Indeed! Life is all about LIVING each moment; being at peace with each moment – NOT what we WANT in that moment...but just the unadulterated, “Thy will not my will”, the BE STILL NESS of LIVING - JUST THE MOMENT. And then, as Rilke suggests, before we know it – we are Living the next moment...and the next, and the next. The point being, we do not have to run to that next moment...and the next, etc. They come regardless; life stops for nothing or no-one. So pretty soon those answers we sought oh so long ago...are already here! Amazing how that can happen.
When we are “STILL”, moments/life fill in around us. Our way becomes more filled with wonder and sunshine and imagination and beauty and just all the “roses” we may normally miss because we “ran” past them. And yes – the “thorns” may become more prominent as well. But up-close-and-personal, “thorns” have their own, unique beauty...and purpose. Rain and sunshine...cold and hot...big and small, etc.
The bottom line being...LIVING. LIVE your moments. And maybe sometimes, we may receive “answers” to what “questions' you were totally unaware.
Peace be with you in each of your endless LIVED 'moments' today.
Nature prevails...
