January 19, 2025

380: Try to Love the Questions Themselves

27 minutes

To live in the unresolved questions, tensions and contradictions of life is to be alive. To try to turn away from them, as if our lives could be question and confusion free is simply to drive the tensions inside us - to divide ourselves internally and to divide ourselves from life. We could see, as Lizzie says in this conversation, that "the tensions are life itself". So what does it take to live in the midst of life's complexity rather than turn away - to live life rather than pretend to live? That's the question we take up in this episode.

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Here’s our source for this week:

“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves….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

Parker Palmer writes in reflection:

But my deeper hope comes with Rilke’s words “and the point is to live everything.” Of course that is the point! If I do not fully live the tensions that come my way, those tensions do not disappear: they go underground and multiply. I may not know how to solve them, but by wrapping my life around them and trying to live out their resolution, I open myself to new possibilities and keep the tensions from tearing me apart.

There is only one alternative: an unlived life, a life lived in denial of the tensions that life brings. Here I play a masked role, pretending outwardly that I have no tensions at all while inwardly all those tensions I pretend not to have are ripping the fabric of my life.

Pretending is another name for dividedness, a state that keeps us from cultivating the capacity for connectedness on which teaching depends. When we pretend we fall out of community with the common centre that is both the root and the fruit of teaching at its best. But when we understand that ‘the point is to live everything’ we will recover all that is lost.

From the Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer

Photo by Jacky Nelson on Unsplash

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