My mom tells me that while we were at Disney World,  I constantly asked, “Is that real, is that real, is that real?” It seems like a strange question for a 6 year old to be asking. Why not just relish in the wonderment of the world?

But that’s who I am. Very analytical and very cerebral. Constantly questioning my world, myself, and everything that I do and think. I get caught up in trying to find the right answers…..

Did it matter if the T-Rex was real? Or the ape? Or the explosions or the death-defying stunts? Why did I want to know?

I’ve been told recently to live in the question. That to ask the question is enough. And it reminds me of Letters to a Young Poet and Rainer Maria Rilke’s thoughtful and encouraging words:

“…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.”

I like that idea very much….of living my way to the answer. I think this is what I must do. So I ask, “What else is possible?” 

Life is like a house with many rooms. You’ve been in one room your whole life. You accept it. The color of the walls. The size. The furniture. You accept it. There’s nothing else.

But then someone knocks. You’ve never heard a knock before. But you answer the door and open it and walk out into the living room to see 50 more doors. Other rooms. Possibilities.

And you never knew they existed because you were so cotent and comfortable in your own room.

The question then becomes, what do you do now?