PHOTO: JOANNA PALLARIS

“…perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.”
“I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with this alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing.
“For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us. The added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there anymore, is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered.”
“We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate the future enters us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moments at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us from the outside.”
“The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go in us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it ‘happens’ (that is steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke, from his wonderful Letters to a Young Poet
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