Does it matter if you know why?
Author’s Note: Was going through my old blog and found this post, and I’m finding that what I wrote then just resonates so much with who I am and what I’m doing now. — Sophie
This evening, my mom, dad, and I went to watch my brother's choir (the Ateneo College Glee Club) in concert. It was their return concert after touring Europe for over a month, mainly because they competed for the title in the European Grand Prix.
During the concert, one of the choir members shared his thoughts as they prepared to compete -- the feeling was familiar, he said, because he had competed for the title with the choir nearly 10 years ago. Both times, the grand prize title eluded them.
Upset, he shared how he had to ask himself why; why did they keep on losing? Why then, why now? And then, he said something which struck a chord in me. Does it really matter if you know why?
In the end, he said, it mattered more how hard they had worked to compete for that title again. It mattered that they did it anyway, win or lose.
Those words, along with the great music of the choir, made me think of the "whys" in my life. Why I stuck to some things and quickly abandoned others. Why I felt the way I did about many things and many people. Why I was placed in the circumstances I was in now.
Personally, at this point in my life, I find that the whys aren't as important as what I am doing about them, and how I am addressing them given what I have at my disposal.
As though by magic, I found myself stumbling over this favorite quote of mine by Rainer Maria Rilke, taken from Letters to a Young Poet. This pretty much sums up how I feel about the questions now.
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
May we all live our way into the answers!