For Whitney

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.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

While I've had the first part of this quote on my blog for over a year, I recently discovered the next few sentences. I think this paragraph summarizes the last five to seven years of my life. Thankfully, even the last sentence is true. Sometimes you really do "live your way into the answer."

[Side note: I first discovered this small book when Sister Mary Clarence (Whoopi) recommends it to Rita Louise Watson (Lauryn Hill, ya'll!) as she struggles with the decision to abandon her high school choir because, in the words of her tightly-wound mama, "singing does not put food on the table--singing does not pay the bills" in the screen classic Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. This little gem also boasts the best movie quote of all time, which Brother Robby and I like to use against one another: "Baby, SAVE IT for OPRAH!"]