Living the Questions

An illustrated meditation.

I was 17 the first time I read those words.

I had just been rejected from my dream college, and it felt like I was facing my first real question in life: What if the path I had envisioned for myself was not in fact the path I was to take?

Then a card arrived in the mail from my mom, who was on a work trip at the time.

Still feeling the sting of rejection — and the even greater weight of not-knowing — I opened her card and found that singular exhortation waiting for me:

Live the questions now.

I didn’t know what Rilke meant, but I knew I needed to figure it out.

I bought a thin, paperback copy of Letters to a Young Poet, the book in which this passage originally appears, and over the years, it became as sacred a text to me as the Bible — its cover growing softened and worn, with hardly a page that wasn’t dog-eared or underlined.

Today I turn 39 years old, and as I look back over the past two decades — over all the questions that slowly found their answers, only to give way to new questions — I wonder if what Rilke meant has been hidden in plain sight this whole time, right there in the words I’ve always carried with me.

I think Rilke just wanted us to live, and not to let what we don’t know about tomorrow hold us back from being open and alive today.

To live the questions now.

To live the questions.

To live.