News from Jules | 02.07.2022 | Live the Questions
There are people who touch our lives and leave a mark forever. Most of these people simply cross our path for a short, albeit significant, moment. A rare few keep crossing our path for our whole life.
Perhaps they make sure we’re still on our path?
Somewhere between my high school graduation party before I turned 18-years-old and my 30th birthday I lost touch with one of the most significant people in my life. The first person who believed in me for real. Who told me, with conviction—you are a writer. As my middle school English teacher, she was the ultimate authority. I wasn’t just a published author by the PTA moms binding our crayon-illustrated stories in the elementary school library.
“No kid, you’ve got real talent.”
For three years she challenged me: to read college-level books and to write like the greats. And for Pete’s sake, “Keep it Simple Silly.” Editing was never my strongest skill.
In high school, whenever I came over to babysit for the Rwandan family that she and her best friend/roommate/fellow ex-nun sponsored to the U.S., she’d ask me: How’s the writing?
Even though I was an English major in college and then a journalism major in graduate school, I drifted further from writing and more to performing. From listening to talking. From observing to judging.
By my late 20s, I felt disconnected. Communicating was work and it wasn’t working. I had lost all confidence in my talent.
And I had completely lost track of my first believer.
So it was one of the great miracles of my life when I saw her crossing the street in downtown Portland on my 30th birthday. All dressed up in heels and ignoring traffic I ran after her, yelling her name like a groupie chasing a rockstar.
I haven’t lost track of her since.
Last week, I excitedly dressed up for a tea party at her suburban apartment putting on mascara and an actual dress. I knew what one of her first questions would be: How’s the writing?
One of the many questions I am living right now. Somewhat patiently.
Like Rainer Maria Rilke’s wise words to his protege in Letters to a Young Poet:
“I want to beg you…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 you because you would not be able to live them. And 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.”
As we walked from the apartment complex parking lot to her front door, we encountered the property manager who already knew I was coming.
“Ah, this is your student?,” she asked.
“Oh no, no, we’re peers now. She’s a writer too.”
I was instantly at ease in her compact, pristine home, gently warm and bright from the light pouring in through the patio doors. Egg salad sandwiches on gluten-free bread (just for me) and fruit salad on the dining room table, with snickerdoodle cookies and teacups ready and waiting.
Never one to hold back, she jumped right into the recent deaths in her family, the political frustrations, and the new creative routines that she’d written about in her letters. And asked me all about my life. And of course, my writing.
Once again, it’s feeling second nature to simply observe, to listen, to imagine all the things I could write.
As we were talking shop, she excitedly retrieved her computer to read aloud some of her recently published poetry. With the same conviction as always, she told me: “you have to get on this publication submission website. It is amazing. You’ll get picked up so fast.”
I giggled to myself as I made a mental note. Where and how to find freelance article submissions was specifically one of the many unanswered questions I have right now.
Spending the afternoon with the first person who believed in me for real, I affirmed how much I believe in myself.
How right it feels to believe.
And to be on the path.
What about you? What questions are you living this week?
Love,
Jules