Rilke: Growth and Loss

 “You suffer, you say, because the people closest to you are distant: this shows that your world is beginning to grow vast. And if what’s near you is far, then how enormous your whole extent, reaching all the way up to the stars. 

“You should be happy about your growth. You can’t bring anyone along with you anyway. Be good to those who remain behind, be calm and self-assured before them, don’t punish them with your doubts or frighten them with the confidence and joy they cannot understand. 

“Try to have some kind of simple, loyal common ground with them that doesn’t necessarily have to change when you yourself change and change again; love in them life in a different form; be considerate of the elderly who fear the loneliness you are learning to trust.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet