Since it’s been a long time since I posted, I wanted to begin again with a favorite poem of mine. Rainer Maria Rilke’s quote from Letters to a Young Poet found me in 1999 when I was overwhelmed and anxious about relationships and my college experience. There was so much uncertainty at that time and I was still very much dependent on my parents for a lot and being called to do more on my own. Many years after the quote first found me, I purchased it engraved on a cuff. It’s a reminder, even now, to breathe, and not worry about having all the answers today.
One of these days, if I have the guts to do so, I may have it tattooed on my forearm.
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and 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. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that — but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself.
–Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Letters to a Young Poet”
English