Today is Rainer Maria Rilke's birthday. A quote from his "Letters to a Young Poet" helped me 35 years ago, not to be a poet, but to deal with difficulties. I've kept it in a book of quotes that I value:
"I want to beg you as much as I can....to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves....Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer....take whatever comes with great trust and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself, and hate nothing."
Not bad advice for an old man either.
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