I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. ― Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. When I was a child, September represented a reprieve from hot Southern summer days, as pool parties gave way to pumpkin patches and apple picking and corn mazes.
Today, I still relish the simple pleasures of breathing in a rush of cool air, unpacking scarves and jackets from forgotten corners of closets, and witnessing the vibrant transformation of landscapes from green to gold, red, and amber. For me, autumn rests in the space between endings and beginnings; it is a reminder of the beauty of transition, of process, of becoming.
My affinity for the season contrasts sharply with my propensity to seek certainty. Comfort with ambiguity, with the in-betweens, has never been my particular strength.
As I have come to discover on my journey thus far, I’m not alone in my dependence on answers when the inevitable questions of life arise; unknowns fill many of us with a sense of anxiety, dread, even fear. For those of us who experience the world in this way, our most profound lessons often follow the periods where our only option is to—reluctantly—embrace the discomfort that surrounds us.
My work with college students has gradually brought my inner struggle between clarity and uncertainty to a sort of tenuous truce. I find that I use some version of Rilke’s idea of “living the questions” daily as I witness and take part in their processes of becoming.
Nowhere is process more inevitable, more necessary, and more painful than in the development of identity. Pieces of who we are that we had never questioned suddenly crumble; aspects of our being that we never knew existed slowly rise to saliency; our foundation of personhood is deconstructed and rebuilt so drastically that we begin to become unrecognizable to others and even to ourselves.
