Expression, reflection and processing is not just about getting to answers, it’s also about giving proper space for questions to arise.
For things you don’t understand to be honoured.
For things asking to be aired.
For listening to querying material, doubt, bewilderment.
For seeing gaps in a picture or a logic.
To make clearer what is unknown, rather than focussing on the known.
To give a voice to uncertainty, or the certainty of inquiry.
For queries and requests to be heard.
So for this exercise, focus on the questions, try to keep writing questions. Ask more into them, ask more of them. Before yielding, submitting to answers and responses, stay with the questions a while longer. Know that if answers need to come at some point, they will.
After reading the following quote, write the prompt – What questions are in me? What questions do I want to, need to, ask?
Or simply begin writing questions and see where the questions lead.
“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves—like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. 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, Letters to a Young Poet
Links
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1208289-briefe-an-einen-jungen-dichter
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46199.Letters_to_a_Young_Poet
https://poets.org/text/letters-young-poet-first-letter
Jo Davidson
February 2020