Live The Questions

When Life Asks For Surrender

Live The Questions

"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

The ego clings for dear life to certainty, to control, to security, to knowledge… 

As soon as water begins to seep through the cracks in our boat, we scramble to fill the holes and pour the collected water overboard so we may stay afloat and remain safe. As soon as the lights go out, we rush to switch them on—we fiddle with the fuse, change the bulbs, we scurry to light a candle, or gather kindling for a fire—all so we may extinguish the dreadful darkness. 

But what if the task of life is to learn how to swim in the water, to learn how to see in the dark? 

If each one of us is truly honest, beneath the stories we cling to, the narratives that we use to organize both “self” and “world”, we all have a slew of unanswered questions about life… 

There comes a time when the ego’s tight restrain over life is eroded and those questions overwhelm our being. When this happens, the questions have usually become so enormous, grown to such cosmic proportions, that the holes cannot be sealed and the light cannot be lit. We find ourselves sinking in the water, drowning in the dark. 

Such times require a significant shift in our internal orientation. What if, instead of living from the place of answers—of certainty—life is asking us to live in the ambiguity—to live out the questions? 

What if life requires surrender out of us, not a brutal clawing towards more control? And what if we stopped resisting? What if we let ourselves be engulfed by the unknown? What if we let ourselves be held in and ravaged by the palm of creation? What if we gave in to the mystery and lived the journey? What if we dropped away from seeking and sunk into being? What might we then find? What might we then be? What might we then create?

If that is where you find yourself, the questions you have are yours to live out.