By: Kavya Menon ’17
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, or books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you, 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 you way into the answer.”
-Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
You know when you read something and it’s like it is touching at your soul? It’s as if nothing in the history of the universe has ever described your life more perfectly, and you just sit there, smiling, at how insanely accurate these words you randomly came across are. I stumbled upon this quote recently and had that exact feeling—that feeling, as if for one second, every problem, every complication was resolved.
I quickly snapped back into reality to find that everything was not resolved. However, for the first time in a very long time I was so extremely ok with that. When your life seems as though it could not be more hectic and you are about to break down, think about how insanely bored you would be if everything was perfect all the time? And we forget that when times are a little more rough than others, there is still so much to be thankful for—like the time we are going to have with our family this summer, that vacation that has been planned for months, that internship you could not be more ecstatic about.
What I have come to find is there is a thrill in the unknown. There is something to be said about these years in our life when opportunities are endless and possibilities vast, and eventually one day, someday, we will have it all (or at least a little more of it) figured it out. So accept the ambiguity, be selfish, take risks, and appreciate this time for what it is, because on that day when everything is actually figured out…you may be wishing for some more time to “live the questions.”
These are some of the photos I’ve taken in the last week after I came to these “realizations”. Maybe all the colors are all the options we have in our life?