“Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means: go inside yourself.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet (page 12)
For my twenty-sixth birthday this year, I decided to pack my bags and book a weekend retreat of the mind. A quaint apartment tucked in a vibrant neighbourhood of my hometown became my sanctuary for seventy-two hours. Amid pandemic-induced existentialism, many humans sought answers to the question we inevitably ponder to access personal creativity: how should I be spending my life?
While musing over rumblings of thought on an afternoon walk, I suddenly came to notice the unaffected nature of my environment. The inner urgency I was experiencing for purpose, did not affect the normalcy of events happening as I walked down the street. In seeing this, the totality of surroundings became more profound. The absurdity of drivers stopping at red lights, strangers walking right past me – all in their own worlds.
To be aware of one’s state of alone-ness, the impending declaration ‘I am all there is’. What can we discover about ourselves here?
Solitude Is All There Is: A Necessity State
In his posthumous series of collected letters, Rainer Maria Rilke writes to aspiring young poet Franz Xaver Kappus with wisdom for the beginnings of his career. Throughout their discourse, the theme of self, and self alone, to know the answers one seeks is the continuous motif Rilke returns to.
Solitude is a frame of being that your experience cannot be shared or lived through anyone else but you. From the moment you are born, the one-ness of life is either not developmentally grasped or forgotten about in the height of daily experiences. As seasons change and events unravel in life, one inevitably returns to the stark realization that while moments can be shared in experience with others, solidarity is never really left.
It is through the conscious embodiment of this experience to discover meaning in our lives that we step into transformation. As Rilke proposes, from developing a rich inner life, we align in accordance with intended direction. From here, creation becomes a flow that’s endless. The real perspective for our search lies within:
“Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet (page 17)
Diving deep into oneself is a necessary force to calibrate destiny. This act alone, repeated through the relentless perils of loneliness or suffering, bring the protective divinity of knowing who you are at the forefront of life’s uncertainties. In hardships, the guidance from within manifests as clarity on outward decisions in this walk of life.
When a state of peace is returned to through mindful practice, we unify our internal being with our external world in all we create and how we exist. Through we are alone, we need not fret about what comes or how we will end up. It becomes seamless to see that reality is exactly how it should be. There unlocks a sudden alignment in what we do. In its propensity, we accept life’s challenges, act under our true selves, and find attachments turn to acceptance. In its sustained form, many spiritual teachings identify this state synonymously with love.
The Propelling State of Love
“Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”
— Aristophanes (The Symposium – Plato)
To arrive in harmony with the universe, another person, and within the self are intimately connected processes. Though romantic forms of love appear to be at the forefront of importance on the phenomena in our young years.
/w=3840,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
We may forget to cultivate our solitude in-between or throughout the rapture of relationships. The combining of two worlds has a transcendental quality that is admissible in the concoction of love – it may pull us out of solitary.
In unrequited entanglements, we lose ourselves and don’t realize we operate to seek external resonance for the answer. When lust passes the sieves of relational trials, we are left with nothing but our projections of how the other should be. In its ecstasy, how do we pardon ourselves the grace of love’s magnetic pulls to another soul while maintaining self?
As evolving youth still grasping the essence of themselves, it is of grave importance that we see the reality of one-ness as necessary and ill-forgotten. Through the coalition with our inner worlds and experiences with love, relations will serve to enhance our lives in ways we transform into learning about our nature.
Understanding love as an energetic force that should be tempered with as a slow burn as opposed to a firework to see through. As Rilke advised young lovers, the ebbs and flows into solitude must be returned to for the dance with a partner last more than one show:
“…young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot know love yet: they have to learn it. […] But apprenticeship is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving is for a long while, far into life –: solitude, heightened and deepened aloneness for him who loves.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet (page 31)
The Calling To Life: In Accordance To What Is
With the possibilities of what-ifs, the split nature of the young person’s psyche can bounce into countless directions. Even to focus on one path, discovering purpose is often the conflict that appears to stagnate the heroine or hero’s quest of self.
A clue came after ending the trip with scribbles of unrelated ideas yet no tangible outcome. Instead of rushing through the individuation project in haste, discovering this question with acceptance of what comes is the centre of balance to strive for. Craft and outcome cannot be forced, only realized and practiced conscientiously.
To continue in lieu of perceived failure is to see solitude as a meaningful return. Who you are and what you are meant to do will be realized with time. Certainly without guidance, we can tumble further into the hole to seek answers. Not realizing that the solo quest itself was the path all along.
“You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would beg you, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to cherish the questions themselves.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet (page 21)
I leave with a passage out of Seneca’s written works “De Brevitate Vitae”. In it, the intentionality of time expenditure in the shortness of life serves to be the reason:
“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is — the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.”