everything taken away

.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, 

which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. 

Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; 

because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us;

 because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

 That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us,

 the presence that has been added, has entered our heart,

 has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there,

 is already in our bloodstream.

 And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe

 that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, 

as a house that a guest has entered changes. 

We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, 

but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way 

in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.

 And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad:

 because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment 

when our future steps into us is so much closer to life

 than that other loud and accidental point of time

when it happens to us as if from outside. 

The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, 

the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, 

and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate;

 and later on, when it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to other people),

 we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being.

 And that is necessary. It is necessary – and toward this point our development

 will move, little by little – that nothing alien happen to us, 

but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink

 so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize

 that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, 

but emerges from us. 

It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed 

their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized

what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, 

in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them 

at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never

 before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long time

 had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, they are even now wrong

 about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still,

 dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letters to a Young Poet 

The Eighth Letter

photo by Eliot Porter