Rilke ~ The Poet's Guide to Life

"It has been my experience over and over again that there is hardly anything more difficult than to love someone. It is work, day labor, truly a daily chore: god knows, there is no other word for it. Young people are not being prepared for the great difficulty of love. Our conventions have tried to turn this complicated and extreme relation into something easy and effortless and created the illusion that anyone is capable of love. But this is not the case. To love is difficult, and it is more difficult than other tasks because in other conflicts nature herself urges us to pull ourselves together and gather ourselves with all our strength. But once love becomes more intense we are increasingly tempted to surrender ourselves entirely. But really, can this amount to anything beautiful: to give oneself to the other not as a whole and coherent self but by chance, piece by piece, just as it happens to come about? Can such a giving away of one's self, which so closely resembles a throwing away and tearing apart, amount to anything good, can it be happiness, joy, progress? No, it cannot ... When you give someone flowers, you arrange them beforehand, don't you? But young people in love throw themselves at one another with the impatience and haste of their passion, and they do not even notice what lack of mutual consideration characterizes this disorderly surrender. They notice it only with amazement and displeasure when they perceive the tension that arises between them owing to all of this disorder. And once discord exists between them, the situation grows more confusing with each passing day; neither of them is able to hold on to anything that is not shattered but pure and unspoiled. And amid all of the hopelessness of things breaking up, they try to maintain the illusion of their happiness (for all of this was supposed to be in the name of happiness). They hardly manage to recall what they had meant by happiness. Each of them grows increasingly unjust toward the other in his or her uncertainty. While they mean to please each other, they touch each other only impatiently and in a dominating manner. And in the effort to escape from the intolerable and unbearable condition of their confusion, they commit the greatest mistake that can be made within a relationship: they become impatient. They push themselves to reach closure by arriving at a binding decision (as they believe); they try to define once and for all their relationship whose unexpected changes made them scared so that from now on it can remain the same "forever" (as they say). This is only the final error in this long chain of interlocking mistakes. Even what is dead cannot be held on to conclusively (for it disintegrates and changes in its nature); how much less may something living and alive be treated definitively once and for all. Life means transformation, and human relations that are an extract of life are the most changeable things of all; they rise and fall from minute to minute, and for people in love there are no two moments that resemble one another within their relationship's intimacy. Nothing habitual and nothing that had already occurred before ever takes place between such individuals but only countless new, unexpected, unheard-of things. There exist relationships that must amount to a very great and almost unbearable happiness, but they can take place only between people blessed with abundance and between individuals each one of whom is rich, focused, and mindful; they can be united only by two expansive, deep, and individual worlds. Young people - this is obvious - cannot attain such a relationship. Yet if they understand their life correctly they can gradually grow into such happiness and prepare themselves for it. When they are in love they must not forget that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love - they must learn love, and that requires (as for all learning) quiet, patience, and concentration!"

~ Faith