We search for answers.
But we would be wise, in anything but the simplest situations in life and work, to live in the light of great questions.I argued earlier in the week that leadership, trust, empathy, and friendship cannot be reduced helpfully to lists of behaviour.Because a list is an attempt to answer a question that needs to continue to be asked in order to be alive. Because once we have an answer, everything is closed, spoken for, silent. Because simplistic answers cover over the great complexity in which we find ourselves. And because questions allow us to continually respond in fresh ways that answers cannot.Here's a reminder of all of this from Rainer Maria Rilke, who says it so beautifully in his 'Letters to a Young Poet'
I beg you … to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and 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 ever noticing it, live your way into the answer.
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