RILKE QUOTATIONS TO CONSIDER

Good morning Gentle Reader.  This morning I am going to offer you a few quotations from the great poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.  If you have not spent time reading and savoring his ‘Letters To A Young Poet’ I invite you to do so.  The following quotations can be found in this wonder-full little collection of letters.

‘Be patient that is all unsolved in your heart… and try to love the questions themselves.  Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them.  AND the point is to live everything. Live the questions.’

‘Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.’

‘For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all  our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work of which all other work is but preparation.’

‘I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.  Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps some day, far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.’  

NOTE: In this next quotation I have substituted the word ‘WRITE’ with the word ‘SERVE’ – one can substitute any number of words and Rilke’s counsel will hold true [for example: teach, parent, guide, write, etc.].   

‘You are looking outward and that above all you should not do now.  Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody.  There is only one single way.  Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you SERVE; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to SERVE.  This above all — ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: MUST I SERVE? Delve into yourself for a deep answer.  And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I MUST,” then build your life according to his necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.’

‘…I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.’ 

‘There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing.  Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.  It does come.  But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.  I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: PATIENCE is everything!’

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CONSIDERING ‘FEAR’ & ‘ANXIETY’

Good Day Gentle Reader.  On 29 March, 2010 I wrote the following in my journal.

In our culture we frequently interchange the concepts of fear and anxiety.  More often we use the word fear to describe anxiety.  So it might be helpful to distinguish between the two. 

Fear = a feeling of agitation caused by the presence or nearness of danger, evil or pain.  The intensity one feels is directly related to how one interprets the threat; if one interprets the threat as severe then the intensity of the feeling will increase.  When faced with a fearful situation one will engage the situation, flee from the situation, or get stuck and neither engage nor flee. 

As soon as we perceive the threat we develop some automatic physical responses – our heart rate increases, adrenaline is rushed to certain muscles groups, we become hyper-focused on the threat, we sweat, our blood pressure goes up, and our higher level mental functions seem to slow down, if not shut-down as we move to protective reaction. 

Anxiety = a state of being uneasy, apprehensive, or worried about what may happen or about what might possible happen. 

The following example might help distinguish between the two: You are walking along and come to a street and you want to cross the street.  You look in all directions and don’t see any vehicle coming so you begin to cross the street.  All of a sudden, as if out of nowhere comes a car speeding down the street coming straight toward you.  Your normal reaction is one of fear for danger is bearing down upon you.  You quickly assess the situation and decide to engage the speeding car, jump out of the way or freeze in your steps hoping the car will miss you [an aside: if one is intoxicated one might well determine that taking on the car will be the best idea]. 

Now, let’s back up.  You are walking along and come to a street that you decide to cross.  You look all ways and see nothing coming.  You begin to cross the street and still nothing is coming and yet you have the same response as the person who is being threatened by the speeding car.  This response is as intense and since there is, indeed, no car coming – no real threat is present – what you are experiencing is high anxiety.

So what are some of the fears and anxieties that leaders might hold?  Here are some to consider:

–Financial failure [perhaps financial dependence]

–Not being loved or not being ‘wanted’

–Being ‘’alone’ or being abandoned

–Chronic/protracted illness and/or pain

–Being repulsive to self or others

–Believing that you are a failure [especially in some important aspect of your life]

–Dying – growing older and running out of time in your role

–Not being good enough

–What lies deep within one’s self – the darkness, if not the ‘evil’ [that one might see or that others might see]?

There are some questions that might help if we choose to engage them:

–To what extent are you motivated by, controlled by, and/or demotivated by fear and/or anxiety??

–At this point in your life, what are the fears and anxieties that you carry with you?

–What were the fears and anxieties that you carried 5-10-20 years ago?

 –If you continue on your current life-path what might be some fears and/or anxieties that you will be ‘invited’ to carry during the next 2-5 years? 

–What is the difference between being fearful or anxious and being your fear or your anxiety? 

–In what ways do you project your fear or anxiety on to others?  What is the effect and affect of doing so upon yourself and upon the other(s)?

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NOVEMBER, 2005 – JOURNAL ENTRY

Good Day, Gentle Reader.  Here is an entry that I made in my journal during one of my trips to Singapore. 

I am sitting in the waterfall lounge here at the Furama Riverfront Hotel in Singapore (Yes, one could sit in the lounge and observe a waterfall).  I have been thinking about leaders and what they do.

CONSIDER: 6 difficult things for a leader to do – perhaps for most of us to do; they are truly a challenge for me.

1. Return love for hate
2. Include the excluded
3. Admitting that he/she is wrong
4. Offer healing when wounding occurs (especially to self —- self-violence is, perhaps, the greatest violence)
5. Saying ‘thank you’
6. Being vulnerable (two ways) (a) Be transparent = fully human and (b) Carry the wound gracefully (from the Latin, ‘vulnus’ to carry a wound with grace) – You will be wounded, both intentionally and un-

What are the six most difficult things for you, Gentle Reader, to do?

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BEING COURAGEOUS OR BEING RASH

There can be a fine line between Being Courageous and Being Rash.  Here is a story that illustrates this. 

An encounter took place between King Christian X of Denmark and a Nazi officer shortly after the occupation of the Danish capital in April 1940.  It is said that when the king looked out the window of the palace and saw the Nazi flag with its swastika flying over the roofs of the government buildings, he called for a meeting with the commander of the occupying forces.

The king requested the flag be removed.  The Nazi officer refused.  

King Christian walked a few feet away and spent some moments in thought.  He approached the officer once more.  “And what will you do if I send a soldier to take it down?”  After a few moments the officer replied: “I will have him shot.”   Again, the King walked a few feet away and spent more moments in thought.  The King then turned, walked slowly back toward the officer and in a quiet voice said: “I don’t believe you will, when you see the soldier I send.”  

The officer demanded that the king explain himself.  King Christian said, “I will be the soldier.”  Within minutes the German officer ordered the flag to be taken down.   

As I reflected once again upon this story a number of questions emerged into my consciousness.  Here are four of them:  

* Where is the line between being courageous and being rash? 

* What must my inner ‘king’ risk when I am confronted by my internal occupying forces? 

* What are those internal occupying forces that challenge my integrity? 

* What sustains me in my ‘leadership moment’ so that I might choose to act wisely and courageously rather than to react impulsively and rashly?   

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THE SUBJECT OF ‘EVIL’

Good day Gentle Reader, a few days ago I found this long passage in one of my journals.

It appears as if the subject of evil frightens us; it is a dangerous subject in many ways and on many levels.  The first danger is that we see only the darkness cast by other people – individuals, communities, and nations.  Engaging the topic requires courage.  For Aristotle, courage was the most important virtue, for without it he believed that we cannot practice any other virtue.  The second danger is that I/we fail to think about the evils that I/we are engaged in.  One effect of ignoring evils all around and in us is a way of being engaged in them.  It is not enough for us to look at the evil within.  At times we must take up arms against external evils.

Philip Hallie who fought in the French resistance against the Germans in WWII admired the pacifist people of a French village that defied Hitler to save Jews during the war; he resented them as well:  They didn’t stop Hitler.  They did nothing to stop Hitler.  A thousand villages would not have stopped Hitler.  It took decent murders like me to do it.  Murderers who had compunctions, but murderers nonetheless.  The cruelty that I perpetrated willingly was the only way to stop the cruel march that I and others like me were facing.  

Sir Laurens van der Post noted that: Today what life demands of us most urgently is to find a means of overcoming evil without becoming another form of evil in its place. . .one culture after another is still running amok and men are still murdering one another in the belief that it is not they but their neighbors who are evil.

A third danger is overlooking the price of repaying evil with evil.  Philip Hallie writes of his guilt over the killing of young German soldiers; he does not want to forget: If I did not keep aware of the conflict in my mind about being a decent killer, then I would be more immoral than I am . . . Because I deserve that agony; I want to believe in the preciousness of life and be a killer too.  And because I feel this way, I have to pay a price morally. 

Not forgetting what others have done carries its own danger as well.  An evil you cannot forget or forgive lives on in your heart, and continues to affect you and those around you in countless ways.  The more one thinks about particular evils done to one, the greater the risk that one will do evil and the less able it will be to see that this is itself evil.

A fourth danger is that we come to imitate it.  Paradoxically, we find evil to be attractive, if not seductive.  Gregory Curtis captured this when he wrote: We must search for the good, while evil finds us out.  In Eden, Eve did not go looking for the serpent; rather, it came to her.  Evil accepts us.  It does not require us to improve.  No matter how great our faults, evil will embrace us.  Evil validates our weaknesses and our secret appetites.  It tells us we’re all right.  Evil does not ask us to feel guilty.  You are what you are, evil says.  In fact, if you want to, you can get worse. 

Gentle Reader, you and I cannot escape the battle between good and evil; we will always be part of it.  Our challenge is to embrace ourselves as living paradoxes of good and evil, virtue and vice, light and darkness and to nurture the good, the virtues and the light and thus deplete the evil, the vices and the darkness. 

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