A close friend once passed along an insightful gem as I was desperately searching for the answer to some dilemma: “the power is in the question.”
I remember feeling so frustrated that it took some time for me to pause and focus on the words. As the phrase slowly worked its way through my mind, I gradually developed a sense of what it might feel like to stop struggling and allow the situation I was trying to resolve just be.
“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 find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I’ve tried to incorporate a “power is in the question” philosophy, giving myself as much breathing room as I can handle. When I find myself slipping back into a desperate clutching for answers, I notice that the more anxious I feel, the less likely I am to find a satisfactory resolution. Relaxing with the problem is actually easier than forcing the solution.
“To the question of your life you are the answer, and to the problems of your life you are the solution.”
~Joe Cordare
I’ve had the opportunity to experience once again the power of the question in the process of writing this post. I was laboring over an appropriate topic and struggling with a recent bout of writer’s block, and the harder I tried (searching through my library, scanning my notes, madly Googling) the more blocked I felt. When I finally decided to relax and breathe and hang with the question, my eyes happened to fall on the “power is in the question” quote, and voila!
My post is done. Except I really like this last quote even though I’m not sure it fits the rest of the article, but here it is anyway:
“The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.”
~Richard Bach
Source of Quotes: The
