Gertrude Stein once said, in response to the existential question of “Why?” that “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be an answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.” Though I don’t think she intended it this way, her non-answer is very Buddhist. There is no ground under our feet, and everything that will happen, will happen, and none of us will ever be safe from it. It’s not a comforting thought, and for that reason, it fuels the need for answers. Like a lot of people, I’ve given much thought to the why of human existence. Why are we here? What is the purpose? Is there a purpose? Is there a God? And the list goes on. Author Sara Wilson in her book First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey through Anxiety (2018) points to recent research showing a direct correlation between one’s need for such answers and anxiety. The greater the fixation on finding “the answers”, the greater the degree of anxiety experienced. This explains a lot! While I’m not yet willing to halt my search for answers to life’s most complex and confounding questions, I take Stein’s words as a caution and turn to another writer whose wisdom has reverberated throughout the ages. In 1904 Rainer Maria Rilke in “Letters to a Young Poet” offered this advice, which I first read as a Freshman in college many years ago:

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.

So, it’s just a shift in perspective, from answers to questions, actually living the questions until they become answers. Sometimes, though, circumstances are muddy and it’s hard to know what to do. People make promises and opportunities may look good on the surface. But how do we know who and what to trust? If we pay attention, the situation will reveal itself, and with it the real truth of people’s character. All we have to do, to reiterate Rilke’s words, is to be patient. Sometimes, we will be disappointed. People misrepresent themselves and deceive us for their own reasons: insecurity, a need for self-protection or to gain the advantage. It’s a blow when it happens, but such revelations are also part of living into the answers, like signposts pointing the way ahead, narrowing and defining our path in the process.

Joseph Campbell affirms this with his view that “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” What a profound shift in thinking, one that no doubt will help to reduce the usual anxiety that comes with seeking. So, the answers are within us after all. They are personal and unique to our experience. Poet Mary Oliver simplifies this even further in her poem “Answers”, which reminisces about a simpler time with her grandmother: “I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers that could not solve the mystery of the trees” while her grandmother, performing her fall ritual of canning, “on small uneducated feet…poured confusion out…and labeled all the wild sauces of the brimming year.” Brilliantly she paints a picture of the answers being in the sauce of our everyday life experience, long experience. There is no fast track online certification program to that kind of knowing.

The word mystery from Oliver’s poem is easy to miss, but it’s key–both to the message of her poem and to the dilemma of all of us seekers and to the anxiety the seeking brings. As the Sufi poet Rumi knew, “Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.” So, maybe the only answer, if there is such a thing, is to loosen our grip on the desire to know and to relax into the actual experience of living our lives. How profoundly simple! In the process of simply living, we may realize the wisdom of the poet Anatole France: “To imagine is everything. To know is nothing at all.”

So, it seems Stein had it wrong. There are answers. There just aren’t any easy ones. They are revealed through long experience and the dedication, commitment and patience it takes for each of us to bring them to life.