MayBE 2023: Day twenty-five.

(I apologize for the late posts but I thought they were published.)

Questions, Dinner Parties, and Conversation.

Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart. 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.

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

My children used to love adult dinner parties. They loved observing conversations and in the beginning, often dreaded being asked a question. Small talk is challenging but sometimes one question can lead to a conversation that is unforgettable. I tell them to always be open. You never know what you can learn from an encounter.

Back in 2019, I wrote:

In this world, we are having a tougher time having conversation. We are losing the ability to listen with curiosity instead of turning away because it’s uncomfortable to be in disagreement. We are also losing the ability to speak with compassion and a lightness of being in the face of dividing issues.

So let’s start with the timeless dinner party. The first step in getting to know our neighbours. Our community. If you listen closely, you will notice we are all the same – as one of my daughters observe with small talk: “Everyone has their defaults, their safe spaces of conversation but then when someone asks an interesting question, it gets good.”

It’s how we love the question that leads us to live it.

TODAY’S PROMPT:

• Choose one or more…
• Copy the Rilke quote above.
  • Draw a question.
    • Write questions that you are living with that may never be answered.
    • Have or go to a dinner party.
    • Have an interesting conversation with a child.