Even if you are not particularly religious or attend a church, you are probably familiar with the scripture, ‘seek and ye shall find.’

What if you don’t know what you seek? Would you recognize the answer?

From early childhood, I have been driven by the need to know the mysteries of the universe. Dogmatic conversations of a definitive truth aside, my specific religious teachings from childhood left me with the assumption that upon death, one would be privy to the underpinnings of the Universe and awareness of all the Answers.

Morbid little seven-year old that I was, from that point on, death was to be welcomed. Finally, I would know the answers. My mind assured, I now understood that there was a logical end point and goal. Or so I thought.

From there, my overthinking gene kicked in, and I began to ruminate over a cascading list of questions, in no particular order that included the following:

• How?
• Why?
• Where?
• When?
• What next?
• What’s expected of me?
• Am I doing this correctly?

I must tell you, having this compulsion saps some of the joy from life, and it’s only recently that I have come to embrace ambiguity. Leaving room for the unknown and the mysterious allows for possibility, expansion and abundance.

“The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He doesn’t need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas.” — Abe Tannenbaum

There is power in The Pause. Being secure in what you have, having faith in your present and having a willingness to suspend immediate action carries a certain heft. When we press to have problems of ours solved based upon our awareness and knowledge of the available options, we are eliminating possibility by default.

Have you ever found that if you allow another to contribute to a solution that they have resources that you do not? Have you ever paused during a conversation to listen to another’s perspective, only to find that (s)he sees something in a larger context than you had?

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now 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.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

More useful than an answer you cannot understand is the willingness to delay immediate comprehension in exchange for a fuller and more useful knowledge later. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that I told a six year old child how to operate a car. Being able to regurgitate the mechanics of driving a vehicle would not enable this child to truly pilot a vehicle successfully.

Put in a more esoteric fashion, there is a distinct but very real difference between knowing and understanding.

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

Are you going through a particularly dark patch in your life? Have you run up against a figurative brick wall? Run out of resources? Come to the end of your rope? Puzzled by another’s behavior?

Ask for understanding
Ask for patience
Ask for insight

Then be open to evidence of a growing capacity within yourself to see the answers to these questions. Seek. You will find.

Or more than likely, the answers you seek will find you.

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