As we were transitioning slowly out of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, I spent a lot of my spare time working on myself. It was my second year in of being in the personal development world. It was my second year of living by myself. It was my second year of getting to know who I really was.
If you had met me a couple of years before, you probably would have met someone who was lost. I was repeating the same patterns of behaviour and circulating around me were people who I desperately wanted to help but couldn’t, because they did not want to help themselves. The women in my family knew. They were saying that these people were literally “sucking” my soul energy. Someone I know described me as, “the nicest person they’ve ever met.” It was a great compliment but, at that time, I didn’t want to wear this description, this label. Being nice was fitting into the world around me, to the people around me, without respecting my own boundaries. Being nice was always saying yes. Being nice was picking up after people without looking after myself.
The totality of who I was at that time, the totality of who I am now, is more than that one word. I think all of us cannot be summed up into one word, nor should we allow ourselves or anyone else to do so. Language is powerful. Stringing words together can be both a melodic and a free-ing exercise for our psyche. I think in some ways, at that time, two years ago, I was already walking into the person I would develop into.
You may have heard me mention the poet David Whyte before. He is a writer that have brought a lot of healing into my life these past few months. I often hear him say that when we are presented with a problem, when we are presented with a difficulty, a challenge we cannot solve, when we fail to see a solution, any solutions, right away, to “ask the right questions.”
He isn’t the only one who says that. Another figure who has made a big impact in my life these recent years has been Reverend Michael Beckwith, who talks about “asking lofty questions.” The questions that allow you to dream, to expand.
And the work that I will recite now, is by the poet Rilke, from the book “Letters to a young Poet”. It is one of my favourite lines and it reads like this:
“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 like locked rooms and like books that are 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.”
And so, during the past two years, from meeting the works of Reverend Michael Beckwith and of David Whyte, I was reminded of these lines by Rilke again and that is what I did.
The thing about a contemplative tradition or a practice is learning the art of patience. No matter if the problem we face is a personal one or a global one, if a circumstance causes us a lot of pain and confusion or we find ourselves in some kind of a desperate need, we may end up taking the wrong turns. We may end up being unable to think clearly. But eventually, even as our heart continues to ache, our bodies will tire and instead of asking, “why me? Why them? Why us?” We may begin asking a different kind of question.
This is the art of patience you see. Even if we had just ran around chasing our invisible tails like an excited dog, the question, a right kind of question that we need to repeat, may not come straight away. We need to be patient. Our antennas have been tuned to different frequencies all along. It is no wonder that this will take time.
The amount of times I have pondered over a question by now is numerous. I would still be in the same situation, the outer circumstances haven’t changed, but, I stubbornly. tell myself, speaking to myself over and over, “What is the question I should be asking here?” But of course, the lesson of patience is that it doesn’t come right away. I ask and I am met with silence on most days. Days where I think what I am doing is simply ridiculous. A self-made, made-up circumstance - possibly worth nothing, useless and not worth my time or energy.
And on that brink, as I am about to give up, because it may possibly be worth nothing, that it is just myself entertaining my own curiosity, I continue to ask. It becomes like a game for me. The question may come to me. It may not. I have nothing to lose at this point. And if the right question comes, it would be a great surprise.
I am playing a game with my own patience. Even as my heart aches, even with a sense of losing myself, even if I continue to chase my own tail, I continue to try to stay patient simultaneously. Eventually it comes. This has happened to me time and time again. I don’t think I am neither special nor possess special powers. It is just that I was patient.
Sometimes the wait is a mere few seconds. Our hearts may already know what needed to be asked. But sometimes the wait is months or years.
For me, framing my perspective with questions is golden. We meet many people day in and day out. As we get into positions of authority, as we get older, as our life expands to not just our immediate family members but extended families and so forth, we will meet souls with different life experiences and as such, different perspectives. We are also bombarded with many black and white statements and many schools of thoughts.
Sticking to a one particular view only makes our lives smaller. This is where division occurs. But that little question mark at the end of a sentence? That is priceless. That little question mark opens up doors to a deeper relationship with our interiority. A place where we discover we are more than a word and where our life circumstances are only a small fraction of millions of possibilities. And from that place of cultivating patience from within, of waiting for the right questions to appear, like Rilke says, we will, “gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
No Rilke didn’t write in this letter about talking about an answer, not thinking about an answer. With a question that rings truthfully for ourselves, our bodies take on a different quality. Once this question is asked, our hands and our feet begin to walk in a subtly different rhythm. We find ourselves in places and spaces we hadn’t occupied before. Our sensory windows get attuned to other sounds and sights. It is slow. It is gradual. It is steady.
And the only way to realise the answers sometimes is to look back after a certain point, many many many years from now, and realise how you had asked a certain question time and time again, and began to live it at the time of birthing this question, of also meeting this question. And how, in this certain future, you are about to be on your way to asking another question.
Contemplations
:
What questions have you lived?
What is the question you should be asking here?
