Living the Questions

What Jane Goodall, Rumi, and Rilke taught me about aging, illness, and letting go of certainty

Jane Goodall, who died last fall at 91, once said this to Krista Tippett: “I believe part of being human is a questioning, a curiosity, a trying to find answers, but an understanding that there are some answers that, at least on this planet, this life, this life-form, we will not be able to answer.”

I have been sitting with that for a while now.

Why We Crave Certainty — and What It Costs Us

We are a people deeply uncomfortable with not knowing. And because we cannot bear the uncertainty, we tend to hand our power over to anyone who promises they have the answers.

Doctors. Politicians. Preachers. Pundits. Anyone with enough certainty in their voice to quiet our unease.

It is, I think, how we find ourselves again and again under the rule of people who should not be ruling us. Not because they are strong…but because we are tired of not knowing.

There was a time in my life when I believed every problem had a solution and every question had a right answer.

If I could just think hard enough, pray hard enough, and read enough books…the answer would come.

And until it did, I was stuck.

The Diagnosis That Changed How I Asked Questions

Then, in the early 1970’s, I was told I had MS.

The doctor said that I would not die from it but I would die with it, and that it would slowly take my physical and productive life, and there was very little he could offer to stop that.

I could have spent the rest of my years hunting for the answer to how do I fix this? For a while, I did.

But then I learned about neuroplasticity — the idea that the brain is, in my own words, plastic, and can be bent and shaped in new directions. And somewhere in that same stretch of years, in a meditation class, I heard Rumi’s “The Guest House” for the first time. I have never been the same.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

— Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks (read here)

Welcoming Difficulty as a Companion, Not an Enemy

Rumi invites us to welcome every guest at the door — the joy, the sorrow, the meanness, the shame — to greet each one and invite it in. I had spent years doing the opposite trying to keep MS at bay.

Trying to overcome the losses of a marriage that ended.

Trying to outsmart the fear that came with raising two children on almost nothing.

Every difficulty was an enemy at the door, and most of my energy went into holding the door shut.

What Rumi taught me was to open the door. Not to celebrate these things…but to let them in as companions.

MS walks with me now. So do the losses and the lean years that shaped me in ways I could not see at the time.

When I stopped trying to fight them off, stopped trying to be different than I was, an enormous amount of effort simply fell away.

The energy I had been using to push things away became energy I could use to live.

I stopped asking am I sick or not sick. I started asking how do I live with this today?

That one small shift — from answer to question, from enemy to companion — changed everything.

Listening Without Needing to Be Right

These days I no longer need certainty. Not about my body. Not about what is happening in our country. Not about what comes after this life.

And this is the part I want to say carefully, because I think it matters right now…

We are living in a time when almost everyone I know is frightened about something.

The news is loud. The future feels scary.

People on every side of every issue are convinced they know what is coming and who is to blame.

The pressure to pick a side, to be sure, to have the right answer — it is enormous.

But I have noticed something in myself. When I stopped needing to be right, I could finally listen.

I can sit with a loved one whose politics, religion, or philosophy is the opposite of mine and actually hear them…without the old urge to correct, convince, or win.

That does not mean I do not have convictions.

It means my convictions no longer depend on someone else agreeing with me. There is a steadiness in that. A quiet ground.

I have lived fifty years past the diagnosis doctors thought would shorten my life. I cannot prove that living the questions is the reason. But I know this: when I gave up the search for the right answer, I found something better. I found Life, with a capital L.

Rilke said it long before I ever needed to hear it:

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 now 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.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (read the passage here)

Some of us will live the questions and some of us won’t.

An Invitation

If something in this resonated — a question you have been trying to answer, a difficulty you have been keeping at the gate — I would love to hear about it.

Leave a comment below, or simply share this with someone who might need the permission to stop searching for answers and begin living the questions instead.

Come as you are.

(Jane Goodall’s words are from her 2020 conversation with Krista Tippett, “What It Means to Be Human,” on the On Being podcast — re-broadcast in her memory after her death on October 1, 2025.)