Live the Questions

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once advised a young would-be poet:
     "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given 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 dqay into the answers."
We today, in our persistent insecurity, want answers, and we want them now! We do not want to hear that some questions have no answers, at least not now. So we are ready to accept any answer, regardless of accuracy, truth or common sense. Conspiracy theories are just as common as ever, but now they are being brought into the mainstream. (Over 50 percent of all Republicans believe President Obama was not born in this country.)
Some of this intolerance of the uncertain is human nature; we will put up with much, but we have difficulty accepting not knowing. And where we do not or cannot know, we grab anything which seems acceptable to our own experience/predisposition. Have a problem understanding this or that social issue? Cut the Gordian knot by explaining that it is all a massive conspiracy that keeps people in the dark. That way, we do not have to face our own limitations, or the fact that we do not have all the facts.
To be sure, there are influential people/ institutions/ supposed sources of information (are you listening, Fox News?) that deliberately exacerbate people's fears to promote their own agenda. But such are not conspiracies. Some may be nothing more than incompetent. Some may be attempts to stand on the seashore and prevent the tide from coming in. And some, yes, are stirring the pot to confuse and dismay.
Does all this imply that there are no answers, or at least no obvious ones? That, alas, is the way many respond when their own easy answer of choice does not come up as the default setting of life. We want answers, and we want them now! Of course, there will be times when solutions are withheld by unforeseen and unnecessary obstacles. But a child does not become an adult with all of the abilities and wisdom of an adult just because that child wants it. The first shoot of a plant does not grow to its full height no matter how much we might wish it so.