quote for the week.

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 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 find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.  

~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

 

It has been an especially trying week. I posted about it the other day, but took the post back down soon after. It was too personal, even for me and I am the Queen of Overshare.

 

I have been forced to question and reassess many things in my life. I've been having a sort of early mid life crisis I think. Suddenly I'm not quite sure who I am, where I am going or even where I have been. It is a very unsettling feeling.

 

In the middle of my pseudo-crisis, my sister called me with a real life crisis of her own. She is six months pregnant and her boyfriend of 6 years has decided that he isn't happy. They just moved into a new apartment a month ago, they haven't even finished unpacking. 

 

She's staying with us. I don't know for how long. I don't know how well this will work, but she has very few alternatives. 

 

So, it's been a painful and life changing weekend for both of us. 

 

 Part of my deleted post:

 

Sometimes, life is really hard. Not just the big events and big decisions. It's the everyday ones too. All the little pieces that make up a day, a week, a year - your whole life. 

And when one thing goes wrong, or not as expected - sometimes it's really easy for all the little things surrounding it to get unraveled too. I'm learning to knit. And sometimes, I'll notice a mistake I made in one stitch, and it's just one little stitch, but in a row of perfect stitches it's glaring. Now if I kept going, chances are when I get to the end, I wouldn't even notice that stitch anymore unless I was looking for it. And the only other people who would notice it are the people looking for it. But because it's right there, in front of me, I always feel like I have to fix it. Because if I don't, it's not perfect. But often when I'm working back and pulling stitches, I end up in an even bigger mess. I drop a stitch, or twist them or forget where I was when I made the mistake. And then I have to work back further and further until I can get it right again. All because of one little mistake. One little wayward stitch.

 . . .

I've stopped doing things just for me. And honestly, I don't even know how to anymore. Everything I am and everything I believe has been stitched into the fibers of my family. I don't know who I am without them.

 

. . .

I know that we'll keep moving forward and eventually this will just be one of those stitches that only the people who know about it notice. I mean, what else is there to do?

So there's sort of the reason I chose this weeks quote. I get stuck on the questions. I feel unsettled without the answers. Live the questions now. Perhaps someday the answers will come. 

Though my sister and I are hurting in different ways, I think the healing is the same. Keep moving, keep living. Don't wait for the answers. Maybe they'll come and maybe they won't. 

 

Maybe you'll find the answers have changed or perhaps you'll have forgotten the question.