Success, he said, doesn’t just happen. It requires daily effort. And he began to list the things that went into it. This list seemed endless and impossible to achieve. He described physical, mental and emotional discipline, ranging from daily exercise to regulating passionate reactions to circumstances beyond my control. It was pouring by then, and the world outside the window was a spangled gray mass of teary rectangles, crying with me. I was overwhelmed. I wished I’d never bothered to send him a letter. He knew this, so he gave me a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
In the days that followed, I realized that maybe I would never achieve mastery of every item on the long list of advice that had been presented, but my life would only improve if I tried.
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I was quite excited to run across this today. Rilke's thought is one of my favorites, after a period of my life where I needed to learn the beauty of this kind of living. I have it on my desk in my office. Years ago, I tediously painted some of it on one of the walls at our church...that process sank it's truth deeply into me. It is the voice of God to me.
