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Health & Fitness

Waiting for the Storm

While you wait out the thunderstorms of this humid week, read some comforting words for young folk, written by the brilliant 20th-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

It was a dark and stormy night in West Hartford . . .

. . . but before that, it was just hot and humid, like walking outside of an open oven door. The air seemed to have the density of whipped cream, and breathing was a chore. There was the palpable sense of something coming. Ominous clouds settled over the suburban landscape as the smell of wet mulch signaled the coming of what would surely be an explosive storm.

Alright, that's enough. I'm here to write about 20-somethings! But instead of some macabre message to accompany the frightening atmospherics of the last two nights' epic thunderstorming, I will instead propose a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." If you're judging from that title that the book is exclusively for young writers of poetry, you're mistaken. On the contrary, it's a rich little tract of universal wisdom for the young, tempestuous soul – or the confused soul, waiting for what's coming. Whenever I feel like the future's seeming a bit too stormy, I let Rilke set me straight. So I'd like to invite my fellow emerging adults, as well as all other welcomed readers, to meditate on the following words:

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"You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, 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." 

For the past year or so, this particular passage has helped me to remember that all of the contradictions and questions that face a young person are not road blocks; they too must be "lived," experienced, even appreciated. To me, "Live the questions" is an improvement on the terribly overused "Go with the flow." There's a bit too much passivity, complacency, in the "flow" imagery. This seems more active.

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Meanwhile, Rilke affirms the 20-something age bracket with his words, reminding us that even if we had answers, we wouldn't be able to live them. That could mean a number of things: that the wisdom we read or learn from our elders seems impossible to enact at age 20-something; that we literally can't afford – financially – or manage – spiritually – the answers to our questions; that if we answer our questions too soon, we might be missing all the richness of being clueless, idealist, impetuous. The poet wants us to love our questions, not make a mad-dash for the big, grown-up answers.

I'll leave the last word with Everette Maddox, the late New Orleanian poet.

Breakfast

Oh hush up
about the
Future: one

morning it
will appear,
right there on

your breakfast
plate, and you’ll
yell “Take it

back,” pounding
the table.
But there won’t

be any
waiters.

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