This is the last in a series of posts* on reinventing ourselves, excerpted from Your Spacious Self. Enjoy!
Quitting the career and job that defined me for two decades detailed in the last three posts* led to a long period of fumbling in a foggy netherworld I call not knowing. I still find myself visiting that place from time to time. These moments come on when I might least expect them, and often when something new is about to be born. I never know how long these periods will last, but they have become like old friends that I do my best to welcome into my life.
A poem written by the famous German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (when he was all of twenty-seven years old) sustains and inspires me whenever I find myself, yet again, hanging out in the fog. Written as a letter in 1903 to an aspiring young poet, the passage contains a universal truth that speaks volumes to all of us.
“Be patient towards all that’s unsolved in your heart,” it begins, gently urging us to live our questions “like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.” Rilke suggests that answers cannot be given to us because we “would not be able to live them.” And “the point” he goes on to say, “is to live everything…Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” [i]
When we make space in our lives—by conscious choice or not—we are likely to enter a period of deep unknowing, where nothing we do or experience makes any sense in the context of what preceded it; where our vital connections seem completely lost. We may even hit the proverbial wall and splatter all over the floor, as I have done so many times in my life. Rilke’s poem invites us to meet these periods in our lives with spaciousness, to accept not knowing as a legitimate state of being, to experience the mystery of these moments as little flower buds that cannot be rushed or forced or seen. Yet.
Allow the mystery. Feel its twists and turns and seeming dead-ends. This is a very juicy place in which to hang out if you can bear the uncertainty and discomfort of it. I have found these periods in my life to be powerful and creative—dark and messy and exasperating a lot of the time, but rich, like black soil that fosters new growth.
–Excerpt from Your Spacious Self: Clear Your Clutter and Discover Who You Are
What questions are you living at this time? What are you noodling on these days? Sometimes just naming a query helps to open up channels you never knew were there.
I’d love to hear from you!
* To read this four part-series in sequence, follow this order:
[i] Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters To a Young Poet, “Letter Four.”
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[…] To be continued in the final post of this series: “Living the Answers” […]
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Thank you so much for this series, Stephanie. I’m right in the middle of a big old not-knowing place. I’m alternating between floating and flailing.
I get so impatient sometimes, to just have an answer. But… “it cannot be rushed or forced or seen. Yet.”
You are so welcome, Sara. I love your description and can really relate to that feeling of “floating and flailing” (mostly the flailing part! 😉
May your sailing be smooth and the landing soft and gentle. Thanks so much for stopping by and writing!
From Lynne on Facebook: Well we are still right in sync for the year Stephanie. I JUST read that quote in a book I’m reading this morning….Falling apart in one piece..by Stacy Morrison..curious if that’s where YOU saw it.
How cool! Stacy Morrison’s book sounds really great!
I took the quote directly out of Rilke’s book “Letters to a Young Poet” – which I bought because it spoke to me, and I wanted to use his quote in my book.