wisdom

'Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.'
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Years ago I wrote this quote on my bedroom wall. There was something I loved about it and something I didn't. This morning, it was the first post I noticed on facebook. My friends are usually witty but a few of them have a habit of posting poems or quotes that strike me at just the right moment.

Lately I've been thinking about wisdom and knowledge. From a Buddhist perspective, knowledge is what we learn from others - from their experiences whether told to us directly or read in books. A teacher can tell us what books are useful for gaining knowledge. They can help our minds decipher the lesson.

Wisdom is what we learn from our own experience. The lessons we live...and in Rilke's quote, the questions we live. When we live a question and come to its answer, that answer is alive deep within us just as the question was.

I think what I love about this quote, apart from the language, is that I prefer to figure things out for myself, to experience them, to investigate, to wander a foreign city until I define how it feels to me.

What I didn't (don't?) love about this quote is that living a question is sometimes terrifying. Often the things we need most to experience ourselves are the questions we are afraid to live. The ones our egos want answers to before we take a single step forward. For those questions we want scientific data, a road map, an agenda, a weather report, a contingency plan and probability reports regarding the outcome.

I could live just what I know - just the answers. Or i could try to live the questions and trust what I already know on some level... that when it comes to my existence and my questions regarding it, I'm the only possible teacher since I'm the only one who will experience it. And the only way to teach myself about my existence is to live it.

It makes me think of part of a poem I love -

'Drawn by the song of our keel,
who are we but horizons coming true?'
To All my Mariners in One - Samuel Hazo