📿 Perennial Meditations
This series delivers guided contemplations inspired by the writings of Stoics, Saints, and Sages. These short contemplations are intended to help you (and me) think deeply about what it means to live an intentional life.
Living the Questions — The Art of Contemplation
In a series of letters known today as Letters to a Young Poet, the Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke advised his friend to “Live the questions for now. Perhaps then, without noticing it, you will gradually come, on some far-off day, to live your way into the answer.”
It’s an interesting idea to consider what it means to live with a question. We might also reflect on what stands in the way.
According to Rilke, to “live the questions” requires patience. He explained to his friend that,
There is no measuring with time, not even a year matters, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: to neither reckon nor count; to ripen like the tree, which does not rush its sap, and stands firm in the storms of spring, without anxiety that summer may not come after. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there, as if eternity lay before them, so carelessly silent and vast. I learn it daily, learn it with pain, am grateful for it: Patience is all!
