Guest Post: Response to Universe, I Need A Raise

From my beloved R. I'd say she needs her own blog, but then I wouldn't get these awesome guest posts:

In reading your post, my dear friend, I was reminded of a different online conversation I had recently with a different friend, and my answer to youtoday is adapted from one I wrote to him, but I think it is still apropos ofyour mood.

I recently came across this quote from Rilke:"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 written in avery foreign tongue. . .And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

I give you this quote today- on this day, when the dark ceiling of thesleepless night just behind you still looms large- because I have the sense from your post that you are at a place in your life where you, perhaps, feel that you should have answers, or at least more answers than you haveactually thus far found. That you have reached this place ofhands-thrown-in-the-air because, despite all the decisions you have made inorder to have those answers, you are now somewhat disappointed that thereare still things you don't know.

So I wanted to tell you that I have noticed, among my peers who have children in particular, that most people seem to feel that there is some mechanism by which they should have crossed over into a zone of having onlyanswers. Perhaps this is because, once you have a child, you feel some certain responsibility to actually have them. I don't know. Or even if you don't have children, there seems to be some line, some place-shift in the environment that should have happened, around 32, where we stopped being kids, and realized we became, for better or for worse, the adults we alwaysknew were waiting for us.

And yet, for my part- even at 36 and well past that imaginary demarcation line- I can't quite silence my inner teenager and ask "Why *should*?" and"Who says?" Perhaps because I recently learned in the hardest way possible that not all answers are right, but it seems to me now that in some ways,the questions have really never been so good. I was never so sure as when I was 18, but I have never had more wonder about the workings of the world, and sometimes my own heart, as I do now. If you embrace it like that, you may just find that it isn't so much about the answers you don't have, but rather about the questions the foundation of prior answers has allowed youto beget.

I say all this now because I found this quote in the midst of one of my darkest periods, and when I did I realized not only that the darkness was simply a form of a question, but that I had found my epitaph. Live the questions. In fact, my own personal belief is that questions, dark or light, are our tie to life. And that only in the moments before death, will all the answers be revealed to us. Only then will we be free to let go, and fall from the earth, because our souls are satisfied that we *know*-whatever it is that our lives where shaped to find out.

So as you move through whatever struggle you are facing today, and whatever compromises you may be making- with your kitchen, your job, and what have you- I just wanted you to know that you are already living an extraordinary life. You have already found many answers, you will seek many more, and- as you have on occasion already- you will have glimpses of transcendence. Today is one day, and if you are giving up your hopes and dreams, remember that it is likely only in order to make way for the new ones that await you. Don't let the answers you think you have block the questions that will help you get there.