The Wisdom of Advent – Learning to Wait
Week 4: Peace.
If we’re impatient, demanding answers to our questions before we’re ready to understand or act on the answers, we may not learn what we need to know from the process of waiting.
Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austrian poet, offers this perspective, “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 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.”1
We can make progress by living the questions rather than demanding answers before we are ready to hear them.
- What can you learn right now from the questions you are holding?
References
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 35.
Falling Up After 50 