True guides. . .are filled with wisdom but are not answer people. Instead, they call us to live with the questions in a different way. . .So, rather than being answer people true guides move us away from the habit of believing quick answers are the most ideal steps to living fully. –Robert Wicks
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions THEMSELVES like locked rooms or books that are written in a foreign tongue. The point is to live everything. LIVE the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way some distant day into the answers. –Rainer Maria Rilke
Stimulating questions grab our attention and invite us – or is it challenge us – to move beyond ‘answers’ into the unknown territory that nurtures one’s growth and development. Stimulating questions nudge us toward and sometimes toss us into what appears to be a wilderness. A single question can have such power that it pierces our heart and soul in ways that cause great inner disturbance to our comfortable lives.
Gentle reader, try holding one of these questions:
Who am I when I stop doing?
In my life right now, what is it too late for or too soon for? What is it just the right time for?
When you are wrapped in silence what are the deep hungers that reside in your heart and soul?
AN EXERCISE TO TRY
Take some time to sit with and then to respond to the following: What is a central, stimulating question of your life right now?
What thoughts and feelings emerge into your consciousness as you hold your ‘central’ life question? Do you experience, ‘clarification,’ or ‘disturbance,’ or ‘confusion,’ or ‘direction,’ or additional questions or. . .? Be open to and make note of what emerges for you. Notice: I did not ask ‘what answers’ emerge for you – stimulating life questions are to be ‘lived’ as Rilke reminds us. For most of us this is no easy charge, to live the question(s).