Can You Stay In The Question? The Leadership Lab Of Inquiry

I came across again this lovely quote of Rainer Maria Rilke from “Letters to a Young Poet”. Those are words of wisdom, shared with a man  – the young poet – confused about his future, having to choose between a military career or the life of the artist…I wanted to share these words with you.

“… if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and 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. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that — but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself.”

I see questions as the leadership lab of inquiry, and I’m trying to figure out what “Live the questions now” means for me at this point of my life…

• What does it mean for you?
• What does it mean for your organization?
• What would happen if those questions were finally asked?
• What would be like for your organization to live the questions?