Yes, we live in uncertain times. How then shall we live?
Years ago, when I first arrived in France, with my entrepreneurial American attitude, everywhere I looked I saw potential improvements. I suppose this came from my evangelical upbringing, in which I learned that I had something unique that no one else in the world had, and that it was my duty to share that so that the rest of the world could be saved. (!)
When I shared this with my new French boyfriend, it came out as “I want to make a difference.” His response to me was “…a difference in what?” And I realized that the way I had grown up seeing the world… my normal… was not everyone’s normal. It was a bit of a shock, certainly humbling, and the beginning of my journey into the wisdom of not knowing.
It is true. We do live in uncertain times right now. I’m sure every generation has said some version of that. And when I put my potentially eight-decade lifetime in the context of all who have lived and all who will live, I think I’ve probably had it pretty good. But while ignorance may be bliss to the ignorant, it needs to be owned. Otherwise those who follow will reap a bitter crop.
I took the first giant step in my journey of self-realization at Wheaton College. Some have called Wheaton “The Harvard of the Evangelicals”; we students jokingly called it Billy Graham University. But it will give you a sense of where I’ve come from to get to where I am today.
While I was studying at Wheaton, I experienced a deep, gnawing sense of dissatisfaction. I grew up in a world where what was valued were answers – our particular answers made us feel secure. But the answers I was getting at Wheaton frustrated me. For every answer they gave, I had another, bigger question. Then, in my senior year, I accidentally discovered a small book by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In his tiny volume, Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke recorded these words:
“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, and like books that are 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.”
That little paragraph, which I carried around on a small brown piece of paper for years, changed my life. Where Life had once been a labyrinth I had to figure out how survive, suddenly it opened up like the greatest adventure of all. I was saved.
What I have learned in my years of studying and practicing and teaching Creativity is that it is the questions that fuel the creative process. Without curiosity there is no creativity. And curiosity demands the humility of not knowing.
So what I would offer to you today, in the context of our time of unpredictable events and outcomes, is that there’s never been a better time for Creativity than now. All you have to do is get comfortable being uncomfortable, stay curious, and stay on the course of your own life.
You may think that your idea, your dream, your vision, your quiet yearning is just about you. It is not. Your pursuit of it is the process through which, one day at a time, you change the world.
You don’t have to stand on a street corner to resist. You just have to live your questions.
If you have never participated in a live session with me, now is the time. Mark your calendar for Sunday, August 24 at Noon Eastern time. Come spend an hour with me in the Virtual Yurt. Take one hour to breathe and to get back in touch with your wonderful, curious, creative self. It makes a difference.