Live The Questions

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, as well as I can, to 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

A lot of times, instead of leading, people do something called “claming complexity”, meaning they feel like the difficulty of the situation lets them off the hook and gives them permission not to do anything. So you get caught up in saying “Oh, this situation is so complicated, it’s a really big decision, please let me just think about it a little bit longer so I can feel like I’ve really explored all my options when really I’m not doing anything at all but sitting on my couch drinking Tecate because I’m so overwhelmed……” Choosing confusion over action can be a trick we play on ourselves to escape hard yet simple decisions. It is always wise to ask yourself: “Do I know what to do but simply not want to do it?” If so, you need a personal trainer. And a spine.

When I was 20, I used to think making decisions was hard. What would I do for the summer? Whom will I live with?  Should I pursue graduate school? Should I get married? The older I get, the more I realize it’s not so much making decisions that matters, it’s how I live with the decisions I’ve made. College has tests on paper; real life has tests like this.

I once had a supervisor who liked to watch the Tour de France, the biggest bike race in the world. At the time, Lance Armstrong was the king of Le Tour, and we liked to talk about him as well as others on his team who acted as the supporting cast of characters; Tyler Hamilton, George Hincapie, etc. etc. One day, we were strategizing about something or other in my boss’ office. He felt I was getting a little out of line in the points I was (enthusiastically) making, and in an effort to put me back in my place, he said something like: “You know how on Team Discovery there are lots of riders, but only one Lance? And all the other riders are good, but they deliberately subjugate themselves to Lance, because his goal and his ambition to win is most important? Because the ultimate critical overriding objective is that Lance be up on the stage, with the yellow jersey and the stuffed lion, at the end of the race? Well, you need to remember that on this team as well, there is only one Lance. And you are not Lance. You will never be the Lance of this team.”  That was a tough meeting.

Later that night, I was going to bed and, okay, I’ll just put it out there—I was crying myself to sleep. I was pretty rocked by the rebuke I had received, and my boss’ words just kept echoing over and over in my head. I felt like I had just made the most obnoxious fool out of myself with my strong opinions and even stronger self-confidence. The finality of “You will never be Lance” had literally knocked the wind out of me for the rest of the day and I had no idea how to recover. I vividly remember laying in my bed, thinking, “What did I do that was so offensive? I wasn’t disagreeing, I was just offering my own input.  I really don’t think I want to be Tyler Hamilton. I don’t want to be George Hincapie. I don’t even want to be Lance Armstrong, really.” And then, as if out of a fog, I had a thought so crystal clear that it resonates with me to this day, every single time I remember it. I thought:  “I want to be Michele. Who I want to be, more than anyone else, is myself. I want to ride my own race.” And my friends, I have since discovered that when you ride your own race, you win every single time.