Living the Questions: A Meditation on Transitions

Estimated Reading time: 3-5 minutes

At this time of year in schools, we think a lot about transitions. We celebrate graduations of all kinds, say hello and goodbye to friends and colleagues, dream about summer places of rest and joy, and prepare for new roles and new students to come. There are also the more difficult transitions of this season. The bittersweet emotions around leaving a role or a school, or a child heading off to new adventures. Change in any form is often challenging, even what seems like happy change. 

But truly, transitions are happening all the time in our lives. The sun rises on a new day, every day. Our relationships with one another and with ourselves change both suddenly and gradually. The world around us is shifting, often out of our control. As it says in the William Stafford poem, “The Way It Is” – “nothing can stop time’s unfolding.” When we tune into the changes of our lives, they can seem dizzying and disorienting, exhausting not energizing. But perhaps we need to build a different, more patient, rubric to process change and transitions.

Living the Questions

I’ve often thought about (and too-blithely quoted!) Rainier Maria Rilke’s words in “Letters to a Young Poet” about “living the questions.” The longer version of the quote, though, provides even more insights into how to live more fully a life of change and transitions. Here it is:

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

At this moment, as I tune into my own internal and external transitions, I hear these words with more nuance. 

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Transitions often begin internally, in our hearts and in our “locked rooms,” long before they manifest externally. They come to the surface of our consciousness in that “very foreign tongue” - undecipherable, confusing, frustrating. They sometimes start out as a mere discomfort, a “gut sense” - sometimes not even a feeling that change is imminent but that something is different or perhaps wrong. What tools (journaling, walking, meditation, talking with others…) do we have to examine these uncomfortable feelings and questions? How can we hold them longer as questions, examine their shape and texture, and not rush towards something to solve? What processes can we use to see a longer-term horizon?

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.

We are creatures who like to solve problems, who often do not do well in the liminal space between what is and what will be. More provocatively, Rilke’s phrase suggests that sometimes I am actually not ready for the answers just yet. That’s hard to hear and harder to live. What will make me ready? Do I trust the universe to be my ally, to provide what I need, when I need it? What would change if I believed that?

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.

Small daily transitions prepare us for larger ones. It’s practice for the big game. If we fully inhabit each moment of uncertainty and change - an unexpected meeting, a missed flight, an illness, a hiccup in our usual schedule - we build the capacity to navigate life’s more major transitions with greater wisdom and self-awareness. 

Leaning into the questions is even more important when change comes uninvited. Transitions can reveal our core strengths in surprising and profound ways because they provide the necessary contrast that makes our unique strengths and capacities visible. Without the usual scaffolding, I am forced to discover what remains - the thread of who I really am, what I believe, and what I am capable of. Change makes me vulnerable; it compels me to tap into undiscovered internal and external resources, fires up my creativity, and helps me see my community of supportive family and friends in new ways. What dreams crystallize during change? What do we finally let go of during change? If we live the questions now, perhaps other pathways, new narratives, or bold possibilities might emerge from the journey.

Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

I am struck by how many ways Rilke tries to expand my time horizon in this final line. It feels that when the answers actually appear, they will be the least important part of this process. The important part is just to live. Do I really understand and value the patience needed to spin the strands, to create the cocoon, to grow inside, and to gradually emerge when the time is ripe and I am ready to be received? How do I balance the urgency of now, the deadline of the new job offer, or just the need to be more certain and less curious? I am a big planner - how do I both let go of finding the “right answer” and also plan for the preferable while being open to the possible?  

This summer, my wonderful friend and colleague Crystal Land and I will welcome a small and supportive group to Santa Fe to learn how we live and love the questions around life’s transitions. We will provide the time and space and gentle nudges to lean into moments of transition, help you identify your core strengths and the crucial questions you’re asking yourself - who am I, what do I believe - and begin to design a pathway of possibility into the unknown. We hope you’ll join us!