July 6

PATIENCE MONTH: DAY 6: “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

This quote was my constant companion for over a year, during my husband’s illness and subsequent death. And now I have lived long enough to fulfill the latter sentence, without even noticing it. Life is a series of waiting times and living times and waiting times and living questions and then the answers. There are a couple of situations in my life today that are questions, although I am pretty sure I know the answers. I am not completely satisfied with the answers, so I keep asking the questions, asking the Universe, “Is that your final answer?” So far, all I get is another day with the same situations. Okay. I get it…I have learned to love many of the questions, because they have been repetitive in my life. And the answers are much the dearer for the waiting that must happen before I embrace them. The time it takes to sit with uncertainty is the best time for me, because then I can recognize the payoffs that come. This is such a great way to live. I am not wise in the way of tomorrow, but the past and present give me a great deal of wisdom, because I do get it that anything that comes too quickly is not the lesson I most needed anyway. A beautiful piece of writing, nonetheless. There is nothing I am in a hurry to do or see or be today. That is nice, because I spent so much of my early life wishing things away. All I wanted when I was really little was to play all the time. That is what being a kid is all about. Then I wanted to be old enough to wear makeup and date and drive and be done with school, etc. Those excruciating times of young adolescence into young adulthood, when I was doing things and life was way more adult than it should have been, yet I was not given the freedoms that went with it. I know so many people who are working themselves to death, missing out on life in so many ways so they can retire with a pot of money, yet when they do, they are too worn out to enjoy it, or they have no relationships left with those who would enjoy it with them, because they were never present to those others. This is the heartbreak of our culture. I have had numerous friends who died shortly after their retirement, because they worked too much to take care of their health. What good is that pot of money if you cannot enjoy it because you spent your whole life so carelessly. When we become patient with our process and pay attention mindfully to the things that are right here, right now, life is much freer and happier than saving it all for a rainy day. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” We all need to live in the questions, to embrace ambiguity and change, to let the things go that are about the future and show up today to what is here and what is now. Then when the answers come, we can sit in them, asking more questions and so on and so on and so on.