Living the Questions

This is a story about the questions that weave their way through our lives unanswered. We chase them, we wrestle with them, we wonder about them.

I wrote these words a few years ago, as I was near the end of a year-long, world-circling journey in which everything in my life felt exposed; pulled out and laid open on a table.

I share them because they’re just as real now as they were then. Time has passed, my circumstances have settled, I’ve grown and changed and learned some things — but my biggest questions are still with me. I am beginning to think of them almost as old friends.

And I needed to hear these words again. To remember why it’s better to dance with my questions than to keep them at arm’s length.

I thought you might, too.

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August 31, 2016

This morning I woke up at sunrise and drove away from Nashville, through air lush with wood-smoke and heat, fog rising from the white-fenced pastures. I ate one last perfectly ripe peach, hugged my friends goodbye, and turned north: back on the road again.

…

I am beginning to reckon with my original ideas and aspirations for this journey, measured against the experience of what they have become. From the start, I imagined — honestly, expected — that I would come face to face with some grand surprises. I expected that profound things would happen to me; and that I would encounter places and meet people who would change the course of my life. I expected that in traversing the globe, I would emerge somehow more sure of myself, more settled or self-aware, more comfortable in my own skin, and more at ease with change.

…

What I’ve experienced has been something a great deal smaller and quieter. Smaller surprises, and a quieter path. I did not find myself skateboarding down a mountain and escaping a volcano in Iceland like Walter Mitty; I did not meet my Felipe on a tropical island in Eat Pray Love fashion; I have not gotten wrapped up in a wild chain of events and sent off in a completely different life orbit. I didn’t stumble upon a surprising new direction or career path, or have an epiphany of the hidden thing I was always “meant” to do.

…

This season of self-reflection has left me with a sense that, for better or worse, there are still the same currents of light and dark in me as there have always been. There are the same small embers of delight and purpose that flash with magic every now and again, reminding me of what I love and giving hints about what I am made for. But they are still mostly wrapped in mystery and hidden in the deep, and I wonder if that’s just part of the deal. Part of the pilgrimage of identity that is all of life. The search for self and the knowing of self, held together in one physical body, inseparable. Just two voices having a long, meandering conversation with one another.

…

I expected to encounter an abundance of stories on this journey of 60,000 miles. And, I have. I imagined that I would hear these stories, and see them, and sit with the people who carried them, and capture each one like a Polaroid frame — waving it in the air until colors emerged and blurry shapes became recognizable, and then passing it around for all to see. I would take thousands of photographs and write thousands of words, and weave together something beautiful as I traced my route around the world.

…

The reality has been somewhat different. Stories have found their way to me in fragments —like so many small pebbles and shells, traces of paint on door frames, and scraps of paper — stuffed in pockets, tucked in notebooks and carried on my back like a pilgrim. I have taken very few photographs. Instead, I am collecting small moments, stowing them away and waiting for words that feel worthy of them. I’ve found that I often don’t have much to say, at this point in the journey. I’m not sure how to answer the questions people ask about what I’ve seen, what I’ve learned, or how I’ve been changed. Not because I haven’t seen or learned anything, but because the opposite is true: I have taken in so much. I just don’t have language yet for a place I am still passing through.

…

I keep trying to remind myself of three words:

Live the questions.

This is a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and it has been something of a mantra for me. He writes,

“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.”

…

These are the days for living the questions.

The things that are the hardest to resolve are, in fact, the questions most worth living. The tensions of life and work, home and family, career and calling, meaning and purpose, desire and disappointment. The heart-ties of love, of kinship, and the stretch of land and sea between them. The dialogue between the strong currents of practicality and provision and the equally strong, invisible forces of the soul, of destiny. The voice inside that whispers: Ask. Seek. Knock.

I am trying to remember to let these things live as the questions they are. To let them be questions. To breathe them in…and breathe them out.

Because, here’s the thing: Just as hope, once fulfilled, is no longer hope (for then it becomes something else: gratitude, relief, disillusionment, joy) — in the same way, questions, once answered, lose their identity as questions. And we, then, lose the chance to dance with them. To have conversations with them.

This is what I want to say: these are the days for dancing with questions.

Here’s to living those questions, the ones without answers. Here’s to living into a story that may not have words yet, and to making space for conversations that are slow and generous, humble and brave, hopeful and real.

Here’s to mapping a way forward that is honest, if unknown.

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About the Author: Erin Rufledt is a storyteller, occasional poet, and the founder of Luminary Lab, a communication design company that works with leaders and companies to align their vision, their brand and their marketing to win more business and clearly communicate about the work they do.