These Days
…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to 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.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet
I sometimes wrestle with questions that take me to the pits of despair. Questions that have more to do with the lot I find myself in. These are the days when I feel that there are more questions than there are answers. These are the days when I would rather disappear in a dark place somewhere and wait for the earth to open up and take me to its bosom.
We all go through days like these; when it’s so easy to be overcome by sorrow and believe that there’s no end in sight. We’re in a hole wishing that there would be someone who’d pick up a shovel and cover us with dirt and just get it over with.
But these are also the days that reveal to us who we really are, what we’re made of, and what we’re capable of doing. It’s up to us to decide.
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
