Dear Readers,
For the next few weeks, you can expect fewer meditations than usual. During this slowdown, you might consider exploring the archive or podcast for more tools on the art of living. I hope you find something useful for everyday life in this week’s contemplation on the wisdom of questions!
—
Be wise and be well,
J.W.
📿 The Way of Contemplation
The Way of Contemplation is a weekly series that delivers meditations, prompts, and practices on the art of living. These short guided contemplations are designed to help us think deeply about perennial ideas, questions, insights, and what it means to live an intentional life.
The Wisdom of Questions
Questions have power. A question can grab hold of us and seemingly refuse to let go. Many of my previous podcast guests have talked about experiences early in life that ignited an insatiable curiosity about perennial ideas (e.g., meaning, God, the mind, the art of living, etc.).
The psychologist Carl Jung once observed that “all life's greatest and most important problems are fundamentally insoluble…. They can never be solved but only outgrown.” What happens when we are drawn to a question that has no answer?
Similarly, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised in a letter to a friend,
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to have love for the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not seek out the answers now, which cannot be given to you because it you cannot live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then, without noticing it, you will gradually come, on some far-off day, to live your way into the answer.
What does it mean to “live the questions” in modern life? What stands in the way of us allowing the “questions” to unfold?
My conversation with Scott Hershovitz (author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short) discussed why kids are naturally good philosophers.
Herschovitz explained,
I think there are two reasons kids make good philosophers. The first is they’re just new to the world. And they’re constantly confused by it. So they’re asking questions, and they’re questioning everything. Like they don’t yet know what the standard explanations of things are. They don’t know what adults take for granted. So I think just like being perplexed by something, it helps them see what’s puzzling. And the second reason I think they make good philosophers is that they’re not afraid of sounding silly. When they ask questions, they’re not afraid of getting things wrong when they try to answer questions. …
Many of us seem to have lost our childlike wonder, which makes sense pragmatically. Most adults live relatively busy lives with demanding jobs, kids, mortgages, commutes, deadlines, etc.
One way to think about contemplation is simply seeing reality or the world around us. It’s easy to miss what is right before us. You could think of contemplation as a relationship with questions instead of answers.
You might ask, “How does one learn to “live the questions” amid the chaos and uncertainties of life?
For Rilke, the key is patience. We need to change our relationship with time. “There is no measuring with time,” stressed Rilke, “not even a year matters and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: to neither reckon nor count; to ripen like the tree, which does not rush its sap….”
—
Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W. Bertolotti
P.S. If you’re interested in becoming a member but cannot afford it, feel free to request a complimentary membership or use this discount link.