Live the questions
words for when you're stuck
👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! If you’re new to these parts, the short version is this: I’ve worked for myself for a long time, writing 15 (!) books, largely done from home. It sent me a bit doolally, being alone that much and also working within an industry that hasn’t always treated me kindly. That’s why I started writing How to Build a Life, now delivered to thousands of readers in over 80 countries. I’d been desperate to unpick why I seemingly had a dream career but life in general felt so underwhelming. I figured out that my brain likes writing but my soul needs something else, so at the start of this year - in addition to still writing my novels - I took a job in a high school mixing teaching and pastoral work. In one million ways this makes no sense at all, apart from the fact that working out of the house with teenagers is making me really very happy. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and knowing all this means you’re all caught up. WELCOME.
When I wrote a while ago I briefly talked about how I’d been vibing with life, and how that’s better than… not vibing with life. But I also said I have no advice on how a person gets from one state to another, the magic formula for getting from feeling crap to not feeling crap. Sorry!! God, wouldn’t it be lovely to know how to not feel lost? To just have all the answers? Unfortunately, that could never me. Anyway, Rilke said: “And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.”
(Live the questions now. Somebody has have that as a tattoo, don’t they?)
After I wrote that feeling good is better than not feeling good but I don’t know the recipe for feeling good, it just kind of happens?? Eventually?? Once we’ve lived enough questions, maybe??? I got a handful of messages suggesting that even somebody saying, hey, this is a thing that happens was helpful, so I thought we could linger there for a while today.
Linger in gosh, ain’t it something that we’re never always on the up and up?
That it is swings and roundabouts, ups and downs, snakes and ladders.
Life.