Live the Questions
How a Surprising Discovery Changes a Beloved Saying
Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life, a newsletter about navigating life's ups and downs. We're all going through transitions, let's master them together. Every Monday and Thursday we explore family, health, work, and meaning, with the occasional dad joke and dose of inspiration. If you're new around here, read my introductory post, learn about me, or check out our archives.
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July brings two milestones for me. First, it’s my cancerversay – a chance to pause and reflect on how my world continues to be shaped by the signature nonlinear event in my life, my diagnosis as a new father with an adult-onset pediatric cancer.
Second, my decision three days later to ask a group of six men to be present in the lives of my three-year-old identical twin daughters. And to call this group The Council of Dads.
“Will you listen in on my girls?” I wrote these men. “Will you answer their questions? Will you take them out to lunch every now and then? Will you watch their ballet moves for the umpteenth time? Will you give them advice? Will you help them out in a crisis? Will you be my voice?”
'Live the Questions' carved on our kitchen table along with our quotations from the Council of Dads
During the brutal year of treatment that followed, I sat down with each of these men and asked them for the one piece of advice they would give to my daughters. My friend Ben, a writer, producer, entrepreneur, and ever-present voice of consolation, provocation, and inspiration, chose a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek answers now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.”
Ben explained his choice by saying that this commitment to asking questions reflected both his approach to the world, and mine. He quoted an African proverb, The man who asks questions is never lost.
In the years that have followed, I have found this quote to be among the easiest to remember and refer back to. It’s featured in the memoir I wrote about this experience, Council of Dads, as well as in the TEDTalk I gave. My wife, Linda, had it carved, along with the other sayings, on our kitchen table. Clive Standen, the brilliant English actor who played one of the dads in the NBC series inspired by my book, even created a tattoo of a question mark in homage to the quote.
Clive Standen in NBC's 'Council of Dads' with a handmade tattoo that he designed of a question mark containing the words 'Live the Questions'
But sure enough, I recently had reason to question the real lesson of those words. Equally as surely, it was Ben who prompted my reevaluation.
A few weeks ago, Ben sent me an article explaining the untold backstory of that quotation. Rilke’s words first appear in his iconic collection, Letters to a Young Poet, which contain the Bohemian-Austrian poet’s ten letters to a 19-year-old Austrian military cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus. When Kappus published the letters twenty-five years after they were first written, he left out his own return letters to Rilke. For the next century, those letters were presumed lost.
Rainer Maria Rilke, author of 'Letters to a Young Poet'
In 2017, a German scholar discovered the lost letters in the Rilke family archive, and they’ve recently been published. The biggest revelation: How lonely, pained, even self-destructive Kappus was. He writes to his mentor, whom he barely knew, that he twice attempted to end his life. Rilke’s response, in which he says young poets should embrace their loneliness, reads as remarkably insensitive.
But it’s an insight of Kappus that taught me the most about living the questions. When we send a letter to another person, he wrote, we give up our own words; all we keep in return are the words of the other. In a twist, it’s that response that carries the greater weight in how we shape our own stories.
The co-narration of our lives becomes as important as the narration.
The surprising lesson here: In living the questions, we learn to keep seeking, keep challenging, keep growing. But the most permanent thing we have to show for those questions is someone else’s answers. Left only with those responses, we feel compelled to ask someone else whether or not they agree.
The motto, in other words, ensures that the cycle never ends.
Looked at through this prism, Rilke is not the one who we should be quoting all these years later. It's the invisible young poet who asked the questions that produced the mentor's answer to begin with.
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Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, or scroll through previous posts.
You might enjoy reading these pieces:
Introducing: The Nonlinear Life. A Newsletter About Navigating Life’s Twists and Turns
The #1 Secret of a Successful Life Transition
Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, Council of Dads.
Or, you can also contact me directly.
