I bought a book yesterday. A Year With Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke. For those of you that don’t know, I’m quite the Rilke fan. I have a battered, dog-eared copy of one of his most popular works (Letter to a Young Poet- highly recommended). But I haven’t taken the time to seek out further works by Rilke and when I saw this in the bookstore yesterday I realized now is as good a time as any to write again. This book is dated for the whole year worth of reading and begins on January 1, but since I am Captain Unconventional I’m going to start with passage from January 1 today. I don’t have the patience to wait.
So, thoughts from Rilke:
“I Choose to Begin
I love all beginnings, despite their anxiousness and their uncertainty, which belong to every commencement. If I have earned a pleasure or a reward, or if I wish that something had not happened; if I doubt the worth of an experience and remain in my past- then I choose to begin at this very second.
Begin what? I begin. I have already thus begun a thousand lives.”
Today I am apathy itself. I went to sleep apathetic, I woke up apathetic, and I read these words- apathetic. I am having trouble finding my beginning. I’ve discovered I struggle with comfort, with habit. When my life is a shambles and I’m expending all energy just to survive it all, I’m too distracted to examine the things I’d rather not see about myself, about people out in the world. But when comfort leaves me with free time to look out at what the world has to offer, I find myself struggling with a “why bother” attitude.
Not the most hopeful of a Tuesday morning writing. But it’s truth. Now, what to do about it? I could turn my life on it’s ear, but I’ve done that, over and over again and it’s getting old. So maybe what I need is to turn my perspective on its ear. Look at things from another angle. When the problem seems unsolvable it’s because you haven’t looked at it from the right perspective yet. Gotta go find some new perspectives and see what I discover.
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