Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell:
“…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 floor on which they walk up and
down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous
insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in
Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons
and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.
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 so 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 abuses belong to us;
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we
arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now
still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust
and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those
ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into
princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps
everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless
that wants help from us.”
There is room for all range of peace and suffering.
But Unhappy is more interesting to the mind.
What did Tolstoy see: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. How many expressions of Joy can the suffering mind endure when it wants to cling to its suffering?
I spent many years wearing a groove in familiar areas of comfort, but still could not reduce the suffering. I remember well that strip of floor by the window of my being. It is still here with me, still contained in me, just now it can be dwarfed now by the immensity. The dragons from the past few years seem to have been revealed and now the princesses are all dressed up for the ball. My being fills first my body, then the room, then the whole building. Before you know it, I’m ocean sized and more.Try it; close your eyes and expand yourself out to your real size.
Life as Improv 