Live the Questions

Growing up in a generation that is very obviously being torn constantly between honouring tradition, and pushing a new path, I have and am living the example of what many would call the “millennial dilemma”.

Having a family and situation as many would call the all-American life, and seeing the normal route that the older kids would take, and that family members and even my parents had taken, everything almost seemed to take care of itself.

But then discovery happened, growth happened, the personal and global crisis happened, and I began to learn and see between each and every crack that the shades aren’t always black and white. The grey is almost always greater and doesn’t seem to leave you be.

Once high school began nearing an end and most students had a pretty firm grasp on where they were going and what they planned on doing. No one had a perfect image, but everyone seemed to have an outline that they could glide through seamlessly and hopefully have a prize at the end of the road.

I, on the other hand, had not a single clue in the world. I had no doubt in my mind that I wanted to travel, I wanted to meet people, and I wanted to live on a grand scheme. Teachers would ask my plan after high school, where I was to go to University, and I would simply say, “I’m going to travel.” Although I was excited about my worldly plan, I still spoke with insecurity because I knew it was ultimately frowned upon. I had no plan, I had no guidance, and ultimately, I had no college acceptance letters that I was interested in.

I believe that there is no truer statement than, “Life gets better after high school.”

Once graduation had quickly come and vanished, I felt an entirely new freedom. My choices were mine, and whatever followed, was also mine.

And then. My new nineteen-year-old dilemma occurred, what is my passion? What do I do now? Where do I go? How do I pay? (I don’t even know what the cost is!) I would become very emotional, on edge, stressed more than I had ever been. I wanted to do something big, and I wanted to find what I was good at. Everyone was still on their paths, and I hadn’t stepped foot on my first track.

Eventually, I decided to become an au pair. I was extremely set on venturing to Paris and delving into the world of revolution, croissants, and Hugo.

After a few complications that left Paris out of sight, my world opened up and ultimately zoomed into Rome. Precisely in the tiny, working-class neighborhood of Trastevere.. (Accent on the “Tevere”, which is a whole other fairytale within itself.) I soon packed up my suitcases, left home for the first time, and began my personal journey of personal choices, decision, and passion. The dawning of Roman life wasn’t exactly perfect, but the sunset was beautiful and as Shakespeare once said, “All’s well that ends well.”

Coming from someone who for many years, never really connected to the foreign, and particularly American/British constant yearning for Italy, and “La vita bella.” I can now truly say that although I wasn’t born Italian or have even a speck of Italian blood in my lineage, I feel it. Opening my world, and my heart to new experience, people, a language, and a country that I truly feel as if it had adopted me. My first trip out of Italy while living there, upon returning on my flight, I, beyond question, felt as if I were returning home. Life wasn’t perfect. But I was returning to a life that I had fought for and created for myself.

Zooming in on the last year, as I’m almost marking a year to the day that this crazy journey began, I have learned many things. We don’t have to have it all figured out. Whether you’re that scared high schooler wanting to take uncommon direction, the lost twenty-year-old, or the new mom not knowing how to juggle every aspect of your new life and love.

One of my favourite poet’s Rainer Maria Rilke often wrote about the idea of “embracing uncertainty and living the questions.”

I beg you, 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.

Perhaps our lives are merely a bouquet of questions, that with each trial and tribulation, along with intuition, we begin to pick away and with the experience, we honour and welcome the exploration that they have taken us on.