The GREAT Disappointment

“I would like to beg you… 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 answers."
(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

I'm no stranger to asking questions and expecting a direct, honest answer. Asking questions, then receiving answers, has a way of challenging my thinking, opening my consciousness to a new idea or thought process and either directly or indirectly changing me. A summation of individual growth per say. Question answer sessions have been invaluable in my life.

Living the questions is another story. This has not been my forte. "I want to know now!", is more along my idea of answer receiving- in whatever from they should come. As I have aged and begin to see more of my life- both past and present, answers are hard to come by, especially when I seek them from others, aside from myself. The struggle really does lie in learning to be patient for an answer. Again, patience not being another one of my fortes.

Trickiness comes in living the questions whose answers are out of my control to receive. I have understood ever since reading the above quote, the hardship and power of loving the questions, living them and waiting for life's answers to sum themselves up.

Never did I anticipate the emotional impact of finally receiving answers to questions I have been living for nearly two decades. Living those questions was difficult, a cat and mouse kind of game that has been exhausting- to say the least. Receiving them nearly brought to surface almost more than I could take as each puzzle piece seemed to miraculously find its perfect fit and then illuminate a whole picture.

So it is with gratitude to the whole process of asking, living my questions, and living into them, that I chalk so many up to "The GREAT disappointment" and move forward from here; thankful that although some choices brought more questions, more living of those questions, and hardships associated from living them- they also brought more faith and greater understanding.