Trust in your Struggle

The extracts below are taken from the wonderfully inspiring letters of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke regarding pain, sadness and struggle.

Letter Four, July 16, 1903

If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge; immeasurable; if you have the love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you. (...)

I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.

Letter Six, December 23, 1903

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability (...) but perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growings of boys and the begging of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours- that is what you must be able to attain.

Only be attentive to what is arising withing you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.

Letter Seven, May 14, 1904

Most people have turned their solutions towards what is easy and toward the easiest side of easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition.

It's soothing to know that there once lived a poet who wrote these things and passed on his wisdom to the young, the lost, and the dumb to come.

May peace comes to you.

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* Art by Holly Warburton