Try to Love the Questions Themselves

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and 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.

translated by Stephen Mitchell

from "Letter 4" in Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Stephen Mitchell (Vintage), adapted

A question mark on the page of a notebook

Lifting Our Voices

From inSpirit: The UU Book and Gift Shop

More than 250 readings are newly collected here to reinvigorate and update Unitarian Universalist worship.

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