The One You Feed - Living the Questions

Episode Date: March 10, 2018

We all want answers, but often they aren't forthcoming. Learning to live within and with the questions is a art to learn.If you like these mini episodes Patrons get a bonus episode every month. Details hereSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, it's Eric here with another mini-episode. And this week I want to talk about living the questions in our lives. One of my favorite books of all time is Letters to a Young Po the questions in our lives. One of my favorite books of all time is Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke. And the premise of the book is there's this young man, his name is Franz Kappas,

who's a budding poet, and he writes to Rilke asking for advice. And one of my favorite passages goes like this. I want to beg you as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are 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. And I absolutely love that quote. And the quote made me think to ask in the Facebook group, some of the questions that people

were holding in their lives. And the responses were overwhelming. And I thought I'd just read a couple of them. I've summarized a couple to kind of group together multiple ones. But there are things like this. Will my health condition come back? Should I stay in the relationship I'm in or should I leave? Will I always be single? What's the point of it all? How do I find peace within? I particularly like this one. How do I find the energy to do good if doing good takes so much energy? What is my deathbed regret really going to be? After 10 years of chronic illness that took away my career and dreams of a family, what is my purpose now? Now, I don't propose to have the answers to perhaps any of these questions, but I have a couple thoughts about living the questions in

our lives. And I think we all are all of the time, because the future is essentially unknowable. We don't know what's coming. But there's a few things that I think are interesting if we look at questions. And one of them is that they almost always point to the future, not to the present moment, not to where we are now. So questions are by their very nature, They are thought experiments more than they are experiences of living today. And that's kind of what Rilke is getting at, I think, is that you live in the uncertainty today, but the key is to live it, to be alive today, not to always be wondering what tomorrow is going to look like. And we spend a lot of our time either fearing or waiting for or planning for the future. And I am as guilty as anyone of this. I think, you know, my major thought pattern is one of a planner, right? It's my brain is always planning what's going to happen next. Then I'll do this. And then what if we did this? And well, we could think about doing that. And it just goes on and on and on. And so it's all a way of pulling me away from the present moment. Now, I'm not one of those people that

thinks like being in the present moment is the only purpose in life, right? Thinking towards the future, planning, anticipating, correcting, all these things are very important. But if you're anything like me, I do that about 95% more than I need to. That's the primary way my brain works. Instead of it being the occasional I'm planning and most of the time I'm present to what's happening, it's almost exactly the opposite. Most of the time I'm planning or thinking about the future and only a little bit am I actually present.

And then there's that idea of, for me, it's the I'll be happy when this thing happens. And that's another variation that runs itself through these questions. It's the I will be happy when X day comes. And so it's back to this idea of loving the questions and living the questions, living right in the uncertainty that we are in today and not knowing what's coming and not basing everything we have on what's going to happen in the future, but to be here now. There's another thing that this makes me think of and being okay with not knowing whether it be what's going to happen in the future or not knowing answers to certain questions. As humans, we are not very good at this. We don't like uncertainty. And further, we've been taught through an educational system that we should know the answer. And so not only are these questions concerning because the outcome of them has a direct impact on us, we also don't like it because we feel like we should know the answer.

This question of should I stay in my relationship or go is a classic one, right? I've been in that position and I realized that a lot of the pain that I felt in that position was the fact that I was always pressuring myself that I should know the answer. I should be able to figure this out. And I would get very down on myself because I didn't know the answer. And the reason I didn't know the answer is because these questions are hard. All the ones I read are very difficult. It's hard to know what the right answer is in a lot of cases. And it makes me think of this idea of being okay with questions. It makes me think of the Buddhist teacher Suzuki who says,

in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the experts, there are few. And so some of these questions, there are many, many possibilities in them, and we don't have to figure them out today. It's okay to not know. It's okay to be wrong. It's okay to make mistakes, to mess it up. We are still learning. We are still walking the path at any point. This is all part of the process of becoming, of living, of being humans in the world

today. So I encourage you, questions are great, but I encourage you to relax into the questions and allow your life to proceed and allow yourself to be in your life and live your life even if you don't have and probably don't have the answers today. Life can still be wonderful right where it is without figuring it all out. If you like this mini episode, for Patreon supporters, I do an extra one every month. You can go to one you feed.net slash support to sign up and you'll get a free mini episode every month. Thank you for listening. Another episode out on Tuesday, as always. Thank you.