Love the Questions Like Locked Rooms. Can We Keep it Locked, Please?

There’s one other note about the reading from Buddhism Plain and Simple, by Steven Hagan, that I’d like to make. I’m including the reading here, again, for your convenience:
“To be fully alive, we must be fully present.
How do we do that?
To experience the answer to this question, you must come to three realizations:
1 You must truly realize life is fleeting.
2 You must understand that you are already complete, worthy, whole.
3 You must see that you are your own refuge, your own sanctuary, your own salvation.”

I like that it’s stated ‘to experience the answer to this question’, because that’s what it’s about: experiencing it. Living it.

Ranier Maria Rilke explains this well in his often quoted letter four of Letters to a Young Poet. Translations vary, but here it is:
“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, 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.”

I can appreciate that to experience the answers, to learn the answers, I will have to live my way into the answers by learning to love the questions.

What I don’t appreciate is that Rilke never noted that the questions would be a locker room full of raucous, adolescent, pimply faced questions, slamming locker doors under the fluorescent lights. NOT easy to love. I don’t even really want to go in the room.

But then, Buddhism addresses it with #1 of the Four Noble Truths: Life is pain.

Okay. Got it. Sucking it up now, thanks.