"The Walk"

I just fell in love with this poem I discovered...

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces. (Another translation I found says "But what we sense is the falling winds")

Translated by Robert Bly

Rainer Maria Rilke


This poem is a beautiful metaphor for the way I seem to view life... "So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp"...I am grasped by all these dreams of what I hope to experience in the future (in my mind), yet I cannot grasp them (tangibly) yet. There is an inner light within these dreams and visions, even though I know they are a ways away, and they make me press on and keep living with excitement and hope and promise, even if not all of my dreams come to fruition. Yet, as I press on in life, the light ahead leads me to change; my dreams may change and my life may take unexpected twists and turns, but through this I will become a more complete picture of who I am... But I should never stop or freak out because this was not my original plan...this was not who I thought I was...no...I'll call out to God and he'll answer with a, "Keep moving, Julie. This is who I'm molding you into." Yet in my humanity, I will undoubtedly sense feelings of failure that I didn't achieve this or that, or go there, or whatever I had originally envisioned my life to look like.

What an accurate portral of the human predicament. I wonder how old Rilke was when he wrote this and what made him write this. I feel like he and I were kindred spirits...