Loving the Questions

"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

Sometimes it's very difficult to be a seeker, rather than a knower. I have been seeking for nearly a decade, at once a long time and an instant. There are times when I think that it is time to grow up, that being an adult means knowing. There are other times when I allow myself to revel in the not-knowing, the wonder of experiencing something without truly understanding the minutia involved. Part of my attraction to religions other than the one in which I grew up is their newness, the adventure of living them for the first time.

I worry that I am only looking for the newness, and not the understanding or longevity.I worry about the example I set for my children, and the time when my family and friends will lose patience with my journey. I worry about reaching the journey's end before I feel finished and settled. I worry that I won't be taken seriously, and that I'm not taking myself or any faith path seriously enough, either. 

And so I start down this new twist in the road tentatively, almost fearfully, and very inquisitively. I want to know, to understand, to feel, to see, to experience all there is to experience, but mostly just to know. And yet, I need to love the questions first. Perhaps this time of questioning will only end when I'm ready for it not to end yet.