We want to rush ahead. To get there, because here is …… (fill in the blanks).
Yet there is nowhere, except we reach it from here.
And here, this place, this time, requires us to be patient with the only things that will get us there: questions and hope.
Questions, because they hold keys for locks we still don’t know exist.
And hope because we need the motivation to ask the questions that currently have no answer.
The newly translated version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet expresses it so well:
“… Have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language.”
Translation and commentary by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, published June 2021.