I’m considering a major and difficult course correction in my life. In this time of transition it’s easy for me to get caught up in my own circular thoughts and worry. I keep trying to think my way forward while still clinging to the familiar and knowable. I know deep down this is not the way. The only path forward will be through letting go and trusting in my ability to adapt and find what is best for me.
There are two quotes that come to mind as I’m facing this situation. The first is from Albert Einstein and you’ve likely heard it before. I know it is quoted often, but I still like it and I’ll post it here again because it is so relevant to me now.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
— Albert Einstein
The second quote is from Rainer Maria Rilke of whom I have only recently become familiar. I started reading a translation of Rilke’s Book of hours : love poems to God last month and I love it. The poetry is amazing and I love how it speaks to me and captures so much truth and feeling in so few words. I don’t speak German but the original text is next to the English and I like to read it too. I don’t understand a word, but the rhythm and pattern in the original language is so beautiful. I know I am missing so much depth and poetic genius in the translation. I’d love to hear some of my favorites read in German by a native speaker.
Here is the quote (though not from the book cited above, it is from another of his books, Letters to a Young Poet).
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 now 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.
— Rainer Maria Rilke