I am almost twenty-one, but I am not yet twenty-one.
That was the reason that last night, I was the only one left in the car while everyone else ran into the the liquor store. They left the heater blasting for me, but the windows were still too frosted to see outside. I reached into my purse and pulled out Rainier Marie Rilke's
Letters to a Young Poet.
I read these slowly, one letter every few weeks, because they give me a lot to think about. Sometimes I get the eerie sensation that Rilke has written each letter special for me. Each letter always make me stop and whisper,
how did you know?
The letter last night was about sadness. Or, why sadness is important.
How did you know?
When you are in the middle of feeling sad, I think it is very hard to see the benefit of it at all. In fact, it would be an easy kind of sadness, to be able to say "This is good for me, this will pass." Maybe someday I will be able to see sadness that way. But the consuming fears that come with this age:
I am always going to be dependent on my parents. I am always going to have insecurities. I am never going to do anything worthwhile. If I could put those thoughts away into a junk drawer as soon as they came up, I would. I think that's why I like practicing meditation.
So I was sitting in a frosty car by myself, but as I began reading I forgot where I was. I got sucked up above my life, and I was looking down on it.
"
But please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad?"
"Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; out 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."
"So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?"
That last few sentences, about life happening to you, about life holding you in its hand: I had read that somewhere when I was in high school, and put it into the very first song I ever wrote. My friend and I sang it in the school talent show. I didn't know who the author was, but as I read it in the semi-darkness in the back of a car, the words were so familiar to me. I felt like someone had just put the point of their finger between my eyebrows.
You, there, listen up.
