Change

Comments on  "Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII" by Rainer Maria Rilke.

"Change happens in every moment. Not just the events of our lives, but the cells in our bodies, our memories, even our sense of who we are, all shift in a moment, often imperceptibly. We, on the other hand, tend to nurture a fixed idea of who we are and where we are going. We harbor notions of what is good for us and what is not, and try to organize and strategize accordingly. Yet life does what it does with scant concern for our preferences, so the poet is urging us to look beyond the parade of circumstances and events to the fundamental fact of change itself. In wanting the change, we are aligning ourselves with truth, with what is already happening anyway. We flow, rather than self-consciously make our own way. And in that flow sense of who we are and where we are going becomes more malleable and fluid, more responsive to conditions around us instead of bound by fixed beliefs and agendas. In the flow of change, self-forgetting happens, and a deeper remembrance can emerge, the remembrance of being always and ever joined to a greater life - not as another idea or elegant concept, but as a lived experience in the moment."

Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again by Roger Housden. P 21. 2007.