Nobody can Counsel and Help You, Nobody.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.
“Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; 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 write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? 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 “must” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet from Letter One - Paris, February 17th, 1903
This advice from the German poet Rilke remains as true today as it was more than a century ago. Others can encourage and urge on the artist, but in the end, it comes down to exploring the depths of one’s own inner nature and concluding what one must do and who one must become.
Until this internal drive has been acknowledged and accepted and then acted upon day by day, the artist remains in a state of potential like a seed waiting to break the hard protective shell and sprout delicately and vulnerably into life and begin the long journey ahead.
But there must be the death of the seed to begin the creative life. First there is the commitment to become and then the commitment to be. If the creative life is your life, to be a painter or a poet, a performer or a composer, then this is what you are compelled to be, what you ‘must’ do.
It is not easy, it is difficult. The greatest difficulty is found in our own minds. We want to resist, to doubt, to reason our way out of it, to find excuses why we cannot, to justify alternatives that seem easier or more certain.
Then we want to create expectations that we cannot immediately satisfy or reach for goals we are unlikely to attain in the near future, hold ourselves to standards set by others, be acknowledged before we have achieved anything, fear of being weighed and measured and found wanting, not good enough. We fear we will fail ourselves and others. Fear we have wasted our time.
All of this must be abandoned as well. We must start, then we must continue little by little, day by day. That is the way of it. Start somewhere, keep going. Don’t think; do. Get your hands into it.
In the end, all creatives are self-taught, self-motivated and self-affirming. No one can do that for you. It is up to you to fill your own shoes, to uphold your particular spot, to build and occupy your own unique world.
Thanks for reading. This is a completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books and/or become a paid subscriber
Let me know what you think. Comment below.