I haven’t very often met a problem in life I couldn’t solve. I have moments of bewilderment, of course, but I generally am able to figure out what’s not working and how to fix it. At times the fix is so difficult I delay, avoid, deny and procrastinate until I’m forced to take the action I knew I was going to have to take from the beginning. Such delays frequently make everything worse, but sometimes it takes me a while to do what I know must be done.

Now and then, however, I find myself completely stymied. There seems no solution, no detour, no fix within my power.

Being self-sufficient and self-reliant, when this happens I feel panicked and despairing. It usually does not occur to me to ask for help. I’m more likely to withdraw and try to figure out what the hell to do privately.

I’m in the habit of making daily notes, a kind of abbreviated journal. I do keep a journal as well, but my daily notes are in the form of a brief list, noting things like exercise, working hours, what I’m reading, what’s in my attention, and little snippets of observations from the day. I also note any creative inspirations.

It occurred to me this morning, as I walked down through a soggy field to the brimming river bordering our property, that it might be time to accept some problems have no solution, at least not at the moment we want them. I remembered Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favorite poets, writing about living the question.

“…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 in Letters to a Young Poet.

As I make and review my daily notes, I have a lot of judgement about how I spent my time. I often feel I’ve wasted my day or not produced enough. I’ve always concentrated on doing and having rather than being, and I’m hard on myself when I don’t see activities in my daily notes I was taught to define as “useful.”

I wondered, while I was walking, what would happen if I wrote at least one question in my daily notes about my activity and stopped judging the way I spend every single second. Can I faithfully record my daily experience without judging it either positively or negatively?

Can I note my current unsolvable problem clearly, simply, honestly and neutrally, state my feelings about it, and formulate a great question? For example, if I’m binging on my favorite numbing activity, instead of beating myself up over it can I make a note about doing it and ask myself about the feelings I’m trying to numb?

It takes a kind of mental strength to live peacefully with questions, to pause and hold them in our laps and refrain from desperately seeking answers. I have several times been connected to people who disliked and resisted questions. That always catches my attention. I think of questions as a tool for opening up lost or hidden feelings and thoughts. In fact, as I grow older I’m beginning to value questions more than answers, even though questions contain the most tension. Maybe an answer or solution, after all, is not the goal.

Judgement feels good because it relieves my tension, but judgement is limiting and small. It weakens power and reduces possibility. Questions keep everything wide open and foster curiosity and flexible thinking. Judgement is black and white.

I assume that all problems have a fix and all questions have an answer. That might be true. On the other hand, maybe some problems feel unsolvable because they are, or what I need to work with is my perception. Maybe what I call a problem is in fact a gift I haven’t yet unwrapped properly.

Unanswered questions and insolvable problems. I don’t like the way they feel. I’ve always resisted giving them time, space and attention. That hasn’t worked particularly well, and I’m ready to try something new. We seem to be much better at judgement than questions in this culture right now, a trend that is both divisive and dangerous. There are questions aplenty, but it’s increasingly difficult to tell truth from lies, and many times the questions themselves are not honest, but merely tools for labeling and judging.

For now, I’m practicing asking an honest question and living without an answer.

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