Hello again and welcome to this second offering in our special series on Foundations for the Art of Living.

Today we are going to talk about living the questions. This is another notion, really a way of thinking that becomes a way of seeing

and moving through the world. And this one is inspired by the German poet Reiner Maria Rilke and it is anchored in a passage from his letters to a young poet in the early 20th century.

He wrote, be patient towards all that is unsolved 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 even noticing it.

Live your way into the answer.

So Rilke's writing entered my life in my early 20s. I spent part of that in divided Berlin. And I think that when I was young, what it spoke to me was having grown up in a world where there were answers for everything.

And the answers felt too small. And this gave me permission to keep stretching the way I felt called to stretch.

But it has stayed with me my entire life. And across time, this has become a discipline woven into my work and my sense of calling and into the community of conversation and searching and living that is on being.

And it has never felt more directly useful and relevant than in this post 2020 world.

I've thought a lot in these years, but how Rilke too was a citizen of a young century with spectacular and devastating potentials for creating and for destroying.

And on some level, all of the great challenges before us, ecological, racial, economic, political, on some level, they are all fast, aching, open questions for which we do not have answers and will not have anything like answers anytime soon.

And so I find myself turning a new to this wisdom that when we are in this situation, we are called to honor and live the questions themselves.

Now, I have to say also that my love for this teaching and the seriousness with which I take it rests in part on my deep reverence for the gravity and the power of questions in human life.

I think that this is undervalued in a culture that is in love with the form of words that is an answer and the way with words that is an argument.

That I also find a question to be a mighty form of words and I have learned a few things about questions. I have learned that questions elicit answers in their likeness that answers rise or fall to the questions they meet.

And we have all seen this. We have all experienced it. It is very hard to respond to a combative question with anything but a combative answer.

It is almost impossible to transcend a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. But the opposite is also true. It is hard to resist a generous question.

This is a skill that needs relearning, but I believe that we all have it in us to ask questions that invite that draw forth searching and dignity and revelation.

There is something redemptive and life giving about asking a better question.

And it is a deep truth in science and also in each of our lives that we are shaped as much by the quality of the questions we're asking at any given point as by the answers we have it in us to give.

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