MANY MOONS AGO, when I was still a student, the fad was to study English literature if one had no specific career goals or one’s results were below par. As a bright student who loved literature, I was outraged at such blasphemy. Three decades on, I’m still outraged but at the craze to start blogging. “You’ve quit your job? Start blogging.” “You’re in a corona lockdown? Start blogging.” “You’re bored? Start blogging.” So much so, that online gurus are selling impossible dreams to innocents who sign up for their blogging courses!
Fads come and go but what they imply is that many of us mindlessly ape our friends/peers while making life decisions. We lack self-belief, so we choose to base our next steps on what others are doing or saying. Our insecurities do not allow us to look within and find out what it is we really want to do. So, we make decisions that are not right for us, and get frustrated as the years roll by. By then, it is too late to start afresh.
To understand the importance of self-belief, let us turn to Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), one of the greatest German-language writers of the 20th century.
Image by Jose Antonio Alba from Pixabay
Confused cadet
The year was 1902. A 19-year-old boy had enrolled for training at a military academy in Wiener Neustadt in north-east Austria but, in his heart of hearts, aspired to be a poet. One autumn afternoon, he was sitting under a chestnut tree in the campus gardens reading a book of poems by Rilke. So engrossed was Franz Xaver Kappus in the poems that he did not notice a learned and good-natured chaplain of the academy had joined him.
The chaplain, Horacek, told Kappus that Rilke had been a student at the academy some 15 years earlier. The information that Rilke switched to writing enthused Kappus, who did not fancy a career in the military but did not have the self-belief to take a stand. Something told him Rilke would understand his dilemma.
So, Kappus sent Rilke samples of his poems, seeking to know whether he was good enough to become a writer. Thus began a six-year exchange of letters, which gives insight not only into the creative process but also into personal growth and change. The 10 letters were published by Kappus as Letters to a Young Poet in 1929, three years after Rilke’s death.**
The only way
In his first letter, Rilke starts off by chiding Kappus for sending his poems to various magazines, waiting for editors’ verdicts and despairing when they are rejected.
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me that. You have asked others, before…. Now… let me ask you to give up all that. You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can help you and advise you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer.
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Look inward
Rilke goes on to say that if the answer is ‘I must’, Kappus should tap the depths from which his life springs. If any verses came from those depths, he would have found his calling and his self-belief.
And if from this turn inwards, from this submission in your own world, there come verses, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you attempt to interest magazines in these bits of work: for in them you will see your beloved natural possessions, a piece, and a voice, of your life. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. The verdict on it lies in this nature of its origin: there is no other. For this reason, my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it.
Give it time
Rilke advises his young student to read widely to spur his growth as a poet. “Live in these books for a while, learn from them what seems to be worth learning, but above all love them,” he says. At the same time, he urges Kappus to avoid reading literary criticism and give himself time to develop his understanding and self-belief.
Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced… Everything must be carried to term before it is born…. These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer will follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them.
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Bottomline
Believe you can and you are halfway there – Theodore Roosevelt
It’s not important what other people believe about you. It’s only important what you believe about yourself – Rev. Ike
You have been criticizing yourself for years, and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself, and see what happens – Louise L. Hay
**[All quotes from Rilke’s letters have been reproduced verbatim from the Penguin Classics 2016 edition of Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Charlie Louth]