Questions into Answers

Most of my friends from high school gravitated to engineering professions. Although I didn’t follow an engineering path, I like to think of law as the physics of human dynamics. Unfortunately, human behavior doesn’t often follow the neat predictability of a scientific formula or a law of physics. Members of society tend to be fractious, inconstant, and unpredictable. The law seeks to impose order on a society of loose ends, incompleteness, and uncertainty. These imperfections can be frustrating to legally-trained minds because it violates the hope that for every problem there must be an answer, if only one had access to the right case, statute or regulation.

I have posted in my office the following quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet of the early 20th century:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…

To me, this idea invites us to consider that the uncertainties, gaps and imperfections of life are not hateful things, but rather puzzles which challenge our better nature.

Even better is the full quote which reads:

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.

And so in the midst of all the uncertainties, questions, and chaos of modern life, we live our answers. Similarly, the higher essence of law isn’t found in a statute book, but rather in an understanding of living, breathing human nature.

Ranier Maria Rilke (portrait by Paula Modersohn-Becker)