Note to Self

Note to self after quitting full-time job in order to follow writing dreams: As you struggle once again with risk and change—and the fear that accompanies them—revisit the following wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke:

"You should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it. This very wish will help you, if you use it quietly, and deliberately and like a tool, to spread out your solitude over wide country.People have, with the help of conventions, oriented all their solutions toward the easiest side of easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it." (Letters to a Young Poet, 53)