Live Life’s Questions

“I want to beg you as much as I can . . . 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 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.

“Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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    . . . those who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths, and the natures which suffer most sharply are those which also enjoy most keenly.

    Lucy Maud Montgomery, Ann of the Island

    I grew up in a home where showing emotions was not encouraged. As I set out on my own I was proud of my ability to maintain an even keel. But as time wore on I came to realize that holding my emotions in check was just a cloak for numbness. A dear friend offered me this quote and I was suddenly free.

    In order to soar to emotional heights I had to allow myself the possibility of plunging to the deepest depths. Goodbye even keel. I learned to embrace the lows and reveled in the highs. Sometimes you have to live with the rain. But when the sun eventually comes out — and it always does — the warmth and the light are more glorious than ever.

  • The Only Substitute for Time is Focus

    There is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule in scale. It is often the same for one as it is for a hundred. There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted.

    — Timothy Ferris, 4-Hour Work Week

    Of course, I interrupted the book I was reading to post and Tweet this.

    Focus is hard.

  • Shoeless Paraprosdokian

    Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, you will be a mile away and he won’t have any shoes.

    — Unknown

    How could I resist? After yesterday’s exhortation to embrace empathy, it seemed only fitting to also quote a brilliant variation on the old moccasins quote.

    It turns out that the above quote is a perfect example of a paraprosdokian – a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe the first part. Other good examples include my previous post from Ellen DeGeneres or my all time favorite, “When I die I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather did . . . and not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.”

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