"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Live the questions now."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

I've always returned to these words from Rilke because they remind me that some questions are not problems to solve but companions for the journey, like Danielle Dulsky’s ‘unanswerable questions’. We spend so much of our lives searching for certainty, trying to find the right answer or the next step, and yet the questions that matter most often ask something different of us. Rather than demanding a solution, they invite us to become more attentive to the life we are already living.

This is the first in a series I’m calling Questions Worth Living. Each month or so, I will offer a question that has been quietly accompanying me, not because I have discovered the answer, but because I suspect that living with it has something to teach me. My hope is that these reflections might encourage you to become a little more curious about your own experience and the stories that shape it.

The question I have been returning to recently is this:

Whose pace am I keeping?

A few days ago, I noticed myself hurrying across a park on my way home. There was nowhere I particularly needed to be, no appointment waiting for me, and no urgency beyond the familiar feeling that I should be moving faster than I was. It struck me how easily I slip into a pace that feels entirely normal, despite having little connection to what is actually being asked of me in that moment.

Perhaps this is one of the defining habits of our time. We move quickly not only because life is demanding, but because speed has become so deeply woven into the fabric of everyday living that it begins to feel like the only way to move. We hurry through conversations, meals and walks. We fill every pause with a podcast or a scroll through our phones. Even our attempts to rest can become another project to optimise, another box to tick before returning to the momentum of daily life.

Over time, we stop asking where this pace has come from.

Much of it is inherited. We absorb it from workplaces that celebrate busyness, from schools that reward constant achievement, from technologies that continually compete for our attention, and from families where slowing down may never have felt safe or possible. Eventually, the pace becomes so familiar that it feels as though it belongs to us, when in fact it may simply be the rhythm we have learned to keep.

The Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh often reminded us that life is available only in the present moment, yet so much of our attention is drawn towards what comes next. We become absorbed in finishing, preparing, planning and anticipating until the present becomes little more than a bridge to somewhere else.

None of this is to suggest that we should never move quickly. There are seasons when life asks a great deal of us, and there are genuine responsibilities that require our energy and care. The question is not whether we ever rush, but whether rushing has become our default way of inhabiting the world, even when nothing is asking it of us.

I find myself wondering what might change if I allowed ordinary moments to unfold at their own pace. What would it feel like to walk without trying to arrive, to wait for the kettle to boil without reaching for my phone, or to listen to someone without already thinking about what I might say next? These are such ordinary moments that they hardly seem worth noticing, and yet they may be precisely where another way of living quietly begins.

I have no desire to arrive at a neat conclusion because I suspect this is not a question that can be answered once and for all. Instead, it is one that invites me to keep paying attention, to notice the moments when I lose myself in urgency and the moments when I rediscover a pace that feels more honest, more spacious and more fully my own.

As you move through the coming week, I wonder whether you might carry this question with you and simply notice where it appears in your own life.

Whose pace am I keeping, and what might change if I began to trust my own?

I'd love to hear from you! If this reflection resonated, or if the question took you somewhere unexpected, just hit reply. I read every email and genuinely enjoy hearing where these questions lead.