The 1903 letter that’s helped countless people embrace the unknown

Let’s travel back in time for a moment, to 1903. Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austrian poet, was broke. Even worse, he worried that he had run out of ideas. At twenty-seven, he had already written more than a dozen books, though he had little traditional “success” to show for them. Penniless in Paris, the poet received a letter in February 1903. It sparked a correspondence that would later influence the lives of thousands around the world, including such varied figures as Marilyn Monroe, Konrad Zuse (the inventor of the programmable computer), Dustin Hoffman, and Lady Gaga. 

The writer of this crucial letter, Franz Kappus, was a nineteen-year-old enrolled in a military academy, an aspiring poet, and a fanboy of sorts. Kappus was asking the older poet to help him navigate the mounting uncertainty of life. In his third missive, the religiously conservative Kappus interrogated Rilke about whether sexual love was a sin, asking forbearance if he had rambled. He concluded, “I only wanted to share just one of the many questions leading their lonely existence in my soul.” 

What’s unusual about Rilke’s response, and what has made it so enduring all these years later, is that he did not suggest that he had answers, nor that Kappus should seek them out. Instead, Rilke wrote, “I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now: they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer.”

Rilke was not explicit about what he meant by living the questions, but I’ve come to define his response as a strategy to break through the paralysis of uncertainty. It’s a method of truth-seeking that is less interested in a final answer and more in the search for it, can find along the way. Characterized by patience and openness to new ideas, those who live the questions crave the experience of continuous discovery, rather than a specific outcome. In his letter, Rilke converted what we might think of as wallowing—the static discomfort of being unsure—into authoritative action. He imbued the act of patiently holding a question with a sense of momentum, vibrancy, and vitality. 

These lines—“try to love the questions themselves,” “live the questions”—felt familiar and foreign to me at the same time. They comforted and challenged me. They piqued my curiosity because loving the questions felt decidedly different from embracing uncertainty. The idea of embracing uncertainty not only felt impossible to me, as I considered the potential dissolution of my marriage and my future career; it also seemed out of reach for so many other people dealing with their own uncertain experiences. Consider someone waiting to hear whether their cancer has come back, someone uncertain about the results of genetic testing on their unborn baby, someone not sure they’ll walk again after an accident. “Embrace uncertainty” is the mother of all platitudes. 

Rilke’s emphasis on love, however, felt more realistic, more attainable. Love, after all, is hard work. It’s often painful. In some situations, the object of your desire may act in ways that feel insensitive, aloof, or uncaring. They may seem unrecognizable from the person you fell for. In those moments, part of loving them is to be curious about why they’re acting that way and to listen to their response even when you’d rather throw up your hands. 

Embedded in this method of living is a recognition that it isn’t always easy, that you may not want to love your questions, though you still must live with and commit to them. By continually returning to your biggest questions about relationships, meaning, purpose, and identity, you keep an important set of conversations alive: conversations with yourself, with those around you, and with the world. 

But let’s come back to earth for a moment. This was a nice idea, in theory. Still, I wondered: Is it really possible to love the questions of our lives—particularly the most painful and significant ones? What does a life of living the questions look and feel like? And what can we all learn from the people and communities following this path? 

Throughout these pages, you’ll meet many others who have taken a radically different approach to how they commune with uncertainty. And here, I’ll offer an important caveat. Many authors have defined frameworks and offered up methods to guide readers toward decisions with resolve. But in this book I suggest that we should hold answers at bay—at least for the most significant questions in our lives, and at least for a little while. In the spirit of Rilke, we can learn to avoid the addictive appeal of fast, easy answers. Loving the questions is a practice that’s seldom pursued, challenging to sustain, and utterly transformational. 

Defining “The Questions” There’s probably a question nagging at you right now: What questions are we talking about here? The field of possible questions to love is vast. How do we distinguish among questions as varied as “Should I date this person?,” “How can I be happier?,” “Where should I live?,” and “Who am I becoming?”

Throughout this book, I’ll encourage us to think about all of the questions in our life like parts of a fruit tree. 

PEACHES: Some questions are like fruit that ripens and can eventually be picked. These questions fall into the answerable category. There are short-term answerable questions; think about these as fruit that ripens relatively quickly, like a peach. These are the questions that, over a short period of time, get resolved—questions like “Will I get the job?” 

PAWPAWS: It takes a pawpaw tree five to seven years to grow its tangy, yellowish-green fruit. These, then, represent long-term answerable questions. Pawpaw questions eventually bear the fruit of an answer, but the time horizons are longer. For instance, you might question whether you should stay in a relationship, whether a new fertility treatment will help you get pregnant, or whether you’ll end up liking a career change.

HEARTWOOD: Other questions are more like the inner wood of the tree. The purpose of heartwood is to help the tree with balance, stability, and security. Heartwood questions are the ones that stay with you throughout your life. Though they’re fundamentally unanswerable in a permanent way, they are your lifelong companions, helping you return to a sense of equilibrium. Think about questions like “Who am I?” and “How do I live a life of meaning and purpose?” 

DEAD LEAVES: Finally, there are questions that do not ripen into answers and that we do not want to carry with us. These are the questions we eventually need to release. They no longer nourish us and are often questions about past decisions that drive patterns of rumination and suffering. These might be questions that emerge from regrets, about why relationships ended, about wanting closure that won’t come: “Why didn’t I just take that job?” “Why did we break up?” “What if I had just done it all differently?” If a question isn’t helping you grow and move forward, it’s time to let it go.