Do Not Now Seek the Answers

Because I’m a very fortunate person (all loved ones are healthy, still employed and therefore financially comfortable, I really like being at home and not having internal conflict about how and whether to spend time with people, etc.), I’ve been spending the majority of my free time during quarantine either playing Animal Crossing and watching Law & Order (two great tastes that taste great together!), or having a raging existential crisis about the purpose of my life and what I should be doing with my limited time on Earth.

As I was telling my therapist, there’s literally never been a time in my life that I haven’t had a goal or a target or something I was trying to achieve - I’ve always had something that I thought I needed to do to be the kind of person that I thought I needed to be.

The plot twist is that, after the last couple of years, I’m trying to completely separate my self-worth from what I achieve or produce. I’m trying to teach myself that I am worthy and deserving just as I am, without checking any boxes off of a list or bringing any particular gifts to the party.

I’m also trying to always remember that safety is an illusion, and nothing is certain, and assuming that I know anything about what the future looks like is only setting myself up for disappointment.

And so I don’t know what life looks like when the focus isn’t on the future, and on trying to earn my place in the world, and on making sure I’m following a plan to get to where I think I need to be.

And the other day, a funny thing happened. I told my therapist, “I hate that this happened this way because it sounds like the most ridiculous woo-woo bullshit.”

I was meditating, which I often do (for about five minutes in the morning). I was trying to get my brain to let go of the worries around finding the meaning of my life, and I had this lightning-bolt realization about the fact that I’m continuing to look for certainty and the “right” answer, even though I know that’s not possible. And I hazily remembered this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:

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.

So that’s the thing I’m trying now: not trying to find the answers, but just being as present as I can right now, to really learn what does and doesn’t work for me, and make my decisions accordingly.