- What do you tell a five year old boy as he sits there with tears in his eyes and his lips poked out, when he wants to know why his daddy says he can't come over to visit after his daddy promised him he could visit?
- What do you tell a six year old girl who begs you to tell her it is not true as tears roll down her face - that her great grandma has died (and oh, by the way, this is the third family member that has died in the past six months of her young sweet life)?
- What do you tell the 30-something man who married his high-school sweetheart and built an amazing life for them and their two beautiful children, after he learns his 30-something sweetheart has been diagnosed with cancer?
Not only "what," but how? How do you respond to a devastated heart that can't truly hear what you're saying because they are consumed with emotions ranging from anything to insecurity, doubt, fear, sadness, disbelief, rage, pure agonizing pain, emptiness, or a myriad of emotions one can only hope to avoid in their lifetime?
No matter your age, gender, race, socio-economic status, national origin, education, WHATEVER... there has been or will be something(s) in your lifetime that you may not have answers for in the moment or ever... Damn it! It just doesn't seem fair to me! I don't expect to like every scenario or outcome; but I do know if I can rationalize it (regardless if I agree with it), the pill doesn't feel as jagged when I swallow it.
The bottom line - I don't like the fact that there isn't always an answer..... "Because!" doesn't cut it for me either - not as a child or as an adult. A critical thinking human being with feelings sometimes just wants to know, "why?"
Not all the time, but sometimes, there's just not an answer.
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 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. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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