I didn’t meet Rainer Maria Rilke in a classroom. Not really. He didn’t arrive with footnotes or flashcards or a neatly formatted reading list. He showed up quietly, in a reading recommendation on Kindle. So I indulged.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves.”
I wasn’t looking for a life lesson that day. But there it was — gently radical, like most truths are.
Rilke taught me that not knowing is not a failure. That living in the in-between — the ache, the stretch, the fuzziness of not-yet — is not only tolerable, but beautiful. Necessary, even.
That’s a hard thing to accept when you’ve grown up craving clarity. When your search history reads like a crisis, when your heart aches for answers in neat bullet points. When your life feels like a draft you’re too scared to submit. But Rilke wasn’t interested in quick resolutions. He wrote with the slow grace of someone who understood that people are not puzzles to be solved. We are fields to be tended. He wasn’t promising comfort. He was offering permission.
Permission to be without rush, to write without haste and to exist and feel in the now.
“I want to beg you… as well as I can,
to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart…”
It’s the “beg” that undoes me. The urgency in it. Like he knows how hard it is to be soft with yourself. Like he knew I’d read that line at 2 a.m., jaw clenched, wishing someone would just tell me what to do with myself.
He taught me that solitude isn’t loneliness. That there’s a difference between being alone and being with yourself. And that “with” is the harder one to learn.
He taught me that art doesn’t need to be loud. That feeling deeply doesn’t have to look dramatic. That your inner life — your questions, your longing, your quiet — is worth tending to even if no one claps for it. Above all, he taught me this:
“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.”
There’s no map. Just the walk. No answer key. Just the aching, luminous, bewildering now.
And if I’m honest, that sometimes scares me. But at other times, it feels like a kind of grace.
So I’m trying — slowly, imperfectly — to live the questions. To sit in the fog. To hold space for the not-knowing. To let life unfold without needing to narrate every twist and predict every plot. To be a little more like Rilke. And a little bit more like myself.
Rilke’s writing is not a big flashy book on a shelf. When I found him, he was the only copy, small, beige, almost unnoticeable. It must have been fate or God or whatever you believe in, that saw I needed someone to teach me how to live slowly. To let questions sit and simmer. To let the answers come to me instead of chasing them.
I don’t need to know right now what job I want after Uni. It will come to me.
I don’t need to know right now where I want to live in the future. It will come to me.
I don’t need to know anything right now other than where I am, who I am and what I am doing. It will all come to me.
Thank you Rilke.
xoxo Sara