Provocative companions..................

Wisdom from the Chipotle cup:

Back in college, filled with anxious questions about what to do with my life, I read a little book called Letters to a Young Poet by Ranier Rilke.  I wanted answers straightaway.  I wanted a plane to fly overhead pulling a sign that spelled it out.  The book, however, advised me not to seek answers, but to love the questions.   Furthermore, it suggested I live the questions and perhaps one day I would live right into the answers.  Skeptical, I embarked on a youthful experiment, distilling my angst-fueled questions down to these:  What makes me happy?  How do I serve the world?   One was apologetically about my selfish self.  The other, I'm relieved to report, was larger than myself.
      I had no idea how to love and live these questions.  Gradually though, I figured out the obvious, that doing so meant investing quality time with the questions themselves - listening, tending, wondering, contemplating, gestating, waiting.  Such lovely old-fashioned things.  Employing them, I came to discover the passionate, half-buried pull to write, realizing that writing brought me alive, caused me to lose all sense of time, and made me reach for excellence - all of which translated into happiness.  And I was surprised by the awareness that doing what made me happy could become one of the best ways I could serve the world, that in fact one of the more powerful outbreaks of meaning in life occurs when one's passion addresses what the world needs most.
      The two questions I chose to focus on so many years ago are still revealing possibilities to me.  They've been the kind of provocative companions one can spend a lifetime loving and living.

-Sue Monk Kidd