Journalist and applied behavioral scientist Elizabeth Weingarten charts a new path to embrace the questions of our lives instead of seeking fast, easy answers, inspired by cutting-edge research and age-old wisdom from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

What do you do when faced with a big, important question that hectors you day and night? Many people, understandably, seize answers dispensed by experts, influencers, gurus, and more. But these fast, easy, one-size-fits-all solutions often fail to satisfy. Indeed, the notion of taming uncertainty is an illusion.

What if the questions of our lives—the ones we ask about our relationships, work, meaning, identity, and purpose—are not our tormentors, but our teachers? That is the provocative premise of How to Fall in Love with Questions. Elizabeth Weingarten offers a fresh, counterintuitive approach, inspired by 150-year-old advice from Austrian poet Rainier Maria Rilke, and backed by much contemporary science, to deal with questions by learning to live into them, as opposed to trying to resolve them expediently. She recounts her own humbling and messy journey to find a new way to grapple with uncertainty. In her quest, she tells the stories of many others on a comparable path, including famous figures in the arts and academy, whose lives have transformed through a different, and better, relationship with questions.

Designed to inspire anyone who feels stuck, powerless, and drained, How to Fall in Love with Questions presents a simple, radical way forward. Weingarten challenges us, helping us to unlock our minds and embark on the kind of self-discovery that’s only possible when we feel most alive—that is, when we don’t know what will happen next.