Let’s see…

I have this booklet, one that I purchased in my sophomore
year in college, that I have kept nearby to jot in various thoughts and ideas
that I get from practically everything and everyone. The range of sources is
almost comically varied: dialogues from Star Wars, lines from a really unworthy
romance novel, a thought from Voltaire, text messages from friends, a line from
City of Angels, passages from Walt Whitman, a line from a song… and one time
or another in the past six years, these lines have helped me through really
tough decisions.

It’s tiny, just three couple inches tall, and two wide. It
has around 20 pages, and it has taken me 6 years to fill it. Since my writing
on the last page of the book coincides with the end of so many things (and the
beginning of more) happening in my life, I’ve made a mental dog-ear, and marked
it as another circle. Incidentally, circles have always been my main
representation of life. I guess it is mainly due to a novel that I read many
years ago, which described the life of the protagonist as having come full
circle. Starting then, I kept setting goals by way of circles. For instance,
having once attended a seminar, I should, one day be giving one. Having
received a lot of guidance from people I respect, I am now looking forward to
paying it forward and earning the same respect. I guess it is another way of
looking at karma. A few years later, I came across the poem I Live My
Life, and I realized that living full circles isn’t enough; the ring should
not only fulfill my need to accomplish, it must also help me grow. And so my
life, should, at the end, be a set of concentric circles.

I Live My Life

I live my life in widening rings

Which spread over earth and
sky.

I may not ever complete the
last one

But that is what I will try.

 
I circle around God’s
primordial tower

And I circle a thousand years
long.

And I still don’t know if I’m a
falcon,

A storm, or an unfinished song.

- Rainier Maria Rilke

I just finished reading Letters to a Young Poet for the nth
time today, and as always, I am aghast at how strongly I can relate to what Mr.
Kappus must have been feeling a hundred years earlier. It is as though Mr.
Rilke has answered my questions 80 years before I was born, and, reading them
now, somehow helps me accept everything that is happening around me. He says
that I should let life happen to me; that life is in the right, always. A
passage goes thus:

"…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books
written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could
not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the
point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday
far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way
into the answer….”

"…what does it matter to the poor man whether he is devoured by a lion or a hundred rats?" - Voltaire