On living the questions
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”
Rilke was writing to a young man who wanted to be told whether his poems were any good. He refused, and offered something harder: the questions are not obstacles on the way to a life, they are the life.
We treat not-knowing as a temporary condition to be endured until the answer arrives. He suggests the answer may arrive much later, or never, and that the waiting is not wasted either way.