For Krissie

And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life [...]. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much more the unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary.

[...]

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and renewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.

For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of the floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human [...].

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become to like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us.

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. [...] Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet