Waiting and witnessing: Using reasonable hope to cope with uncertainty

Abstract

It's instructive for me to recall the times I have copied out Rilke's advice to his 19-year-old protégé, written when he himself was just 28 years old. The quote has become almost a cliché: “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are 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.