Live The Questions
I guess it’s normal when a major life change looms, but lately I feel like Jon Snow…
… like I know nothing.
Nothing about life, or motherhood, or what to expect as I’m expecting, or what to do, or how to feel, or how to adult, or how to write a book, or query a book, or basically ANYTHING AT ALL.
It’s 100% the baby, I know, coupled with having kids later in life, after most of my friends already have at least one. I don’t so much mind this — I’ve always been a late-bloomer, and I’m hoping that means God’s going to give me a nice long life, so I have time to get it all done — but it does lead to a sense of “Everyone else has it figured out, and I do not.”
I feel like my life right now is made of questions, no answers.
Then I remembered these quotes:
“There were always questions. To exchange one set for another is no great matter.”
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
I may reread some old journals sometime soon, to be reminded that I never have any idea what I’m doing and somehow still got myself to the point where I have a pretty decent life.
There’s also:
“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 now 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 then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
which echoes:
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
So: I shall keep on keeping on, struggling towards the heights, living the questions, bumbling Pooh-Bear-like through life as best I can, the same way I always have.
(Which reminds me: I would really like a Pooh Bear print to hang on my wall somewhere, near a Sisyphus one, to remind me that climbing and struggling and bumbling along is what it’s all about.)
