Tag: coffee

Live the questions now

It’s tough sitting in not knowing. And at the same time, being able to be okay with not knowing is maybe the key to happiness or joy–being able to live in questions and uncertainty.

One of my favorite Facebook pages is “Contemplative Monk.” This week, they used a meditation on consecutive mornings by a favorite writer of mine:

Have patience with everything 
unresolved in your heart,
and try to love the questions
themselves
as if they were locked rooms
or books written in a very foreign language.
Do not 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.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It comes from Rike’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” which is a book I keep on multiple shelves, because I forget it and need to hear it a number of times.

And along with Rilke’s words, the folks at CM posted the picture at the top of the page here, and the two washed over me–the peace, the anticipation, sitting at the ready for whatever comes. With coffee. One of my favorite ways to start a day and a posture I try to take when I sit down at my desk in the morning (though my desk has more books strewn about it).

It’s always the questions that drive me, and people a lot smarter than I am point out that we are defined by our questions. Jesus frequently answered questions with questions (or stories), Socrates was known for the same thing, as were the Desert Fathers and all sorts of deep thinkers around the world.

“Live the questions now.” When we hold out for certainty, we are hopelessly stuck. There are so many things I think I’d like to know, which would put my mind at ease, make life more simple. But that’s a waiting game we can’t win, and even in winning, we lose that beginning of the day, sunrise possibility.

The times my heart beats fastest, the times my mind is most open, the times when I feel most connected to God, Creation, other people, are the times when it’s not a matter of knowing or thinking, it’s a moment or experience full of feeling, shared and reflected back. When no amount of knowledge can add a single thing to it.

When I can look with the eyes of a child, the eyes of wonder, and live the questions now.

When does the butterfly read
what flies written on its wings?

Pablo Neruda, “The Book of Questions”

Wonder and Welcome

“We need to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.” – G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy.”

Watching the sun break the horizon, change the whole color of the sky and the landscape; watching fog dancing on still sleeping water on the cove–that conveys the sense of wonder we can find any given morning.

Smiling at the sunrise, laughing like it’s an inside joke, or on a morning with others running, skateboarding, or paddleboarding, realizing what a gift those moments are to share–that feeling, that recognition, that is welcome.

Maybe it is our job, with the time we have, to find both wonder and welcome. Maybe it’s our job, with the time we have, to be grateful for both wonder and welcome. Maybe it’s our job, with the time we have, to convey both wonder and welcome to others.

Part of that is finding what moves us. Part of it is staying after it, stoking our fire, our passion–what makes us who we are–and doing something with it, not settling, and not just being comfortable.

For me, that starts with waking up, wrestling the dog, smiling. Putting coffee on, grabbing a notebook and pen, a book. Praying. Reading. Reflecting. Maybe it’s a running or skateboarding morning. Maybe it’s watching hummingbirds light on the feeders next to the window.

Wonder and welcome are up to me to find. They are up to me to recognize. They are up to me to be grateful for. And they are up to me to pass along.