“Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed… So do not watch yourself too closely. Do not draw over-rapid conclusions from what is happening to you. Simply let it happen.”
Raine Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“It’s always around me, all this noise, but not nearly as loud as the voice saying, ‘Let it happen, let it happen.’”
Tame Impala, Let It Happen
“You have got to let go and let it happen”
Alan Watts
Letters to a Young Student
Many years ago, sitting in the smoking area of Brighton promenade’s dingiest club, I fell into conversation with a queer moviemaker.
“Do you always see things through a camera lens when you are out and about like this?” I ask him, nodding my head towards the small crowd of feral revellers about us.
The moviemaker laughed. “All the time,” he replied, raising his forefingers and thumbs to make a rectangular lens through which to survey the scene, “I’m always looking for inspiration.”
The writer in me inquired, “What have you found most inspiring for your work?”
“Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Marie Rilke,” the moviemaker replied without hesitation, describing the little book that now sits before me.
I’ve purchased half-a-dozen copies of this book, gifting them to people whom I know would resonate with its pages, including my older sister, two uniquely creative local musicians, and a very dear friend.
As you might guess, it contains letters written by Rilke in response to a young aspiring poet and admirer of his work.
The young poet sends his poems in hope of some constructive criticism.
Rilke’s letter in response focuses not on the poetry, the structure and syntax, the rhyme and rhythm, but on the poet himself.
“Nobody can advise you and help you”, Rilke replies disconcertingly. “Nobody. There is only one way—Go into yourself.”
The aspirant poet, lonely and going through tough times, is filled with doubt, and looking to Rilke for some guidance, some comfort, a crutch to lean on, something secure to grab on to.
Rilke’s response is less than comforting: there is no comfort, no crutch, no security in confronting the life’s changing currents.
Let It Happen
Let It Happen is a song by psych-rock band Tame Impala, which I have listened to more times than I care to admit.
I always return to the song in periods of transition, to its wide and warping soundscape, the clicks of real fingers echoing over otherworldly psychedelic swirls, all pegged to a deep bassline.
Despite the auditory overwhelm, the vocals are gentle, reassuring, “Just let it happen, let it happen.”
When I read Rilke’s letter to the young and struggling poet Franz, his words read with the same gentle ethereal reassurance as that song, despite feeling drowned in the too-muchness of everything.
The words ‘let it happen’ imply inaction, backing off, letting something external happen without your input. This is not what is meant.
Rilke is asking the young poet, after suffering a loss, to let changes in himself happen, compassionately but dispassionately, as with a friend, lovingly and without judgement; but in the meantime, keep moving, earning, burning, loving, growing.
Let it happen means to let go, to surrender, to stop plunging hands into the ocean of your inner life as if you can turn its tides, or grasp on to anything substantial. (Incidentally, Let It Happen features on an album called Currents.)
Let it happen means giving space to the changes happening within you – your thoughts, feelings, emotional life, spirit, whatever term you chuck at it.
Surrendering has this negative twang to it, conjuring unpleasant images of cowardice and the French.
Having had a turbulent couple of weeks myself, times in which I’ve observed impulses to react or resist – or run away like the French – I have opted to surrender, to stop resisting things for being imperfect, being grateful for things as they are, accepting life as it is; letting it, whatever ‘it’ is, happen. I work and play and earn and burn, but whilst acting in the outer world I leave the churn of the inner to resolve itself, without throwing thoughts and judgements into the mix.
Unsettledness, knowing things within and without are on the move, but not knowing where, is an exciting but uneasy feeling.
The temptation is to cast plans into the future just for the security of having something tethered to tomorrow. That ‘security’ is, alas, ultimately a pacifier, a pleasant fiction.
Alan Watts
Cultivating oneself as the detached observer of this inner churn of emotional energy and attendant thought patterns is the Buddhist and Hindu path to serenity and enlightenment
Alan Watts, the honey-voiced gentleman who popularised Eastern philosophy in the West, asked a deceptively simple question. “Do you do it, or does it do you?”
Realising how much control – or how little – you have over your inner life, how much you are the ‘doer’ as opposed to the ‘done’, is humbling. (To me at least.) You don’t ‘choose’ how you feel, any more than you choose the content of your dreams or the day’s weather.
We are dealt the cards we are dealt, in terms of your genetics you are born with and the family into which you are thrown, and to a great extent we are dealt the cards of our experience thereafter. The momentum of these inputs from all directions creates cross-currents that none of us fully understand, let alone ‘control’.
Getting caught up in the word games and narratives we project on these titanic churnings is dangerous: judging our feelings and situations, ‘this is good’, ‘this is bad’, ‘this is right’, ‘this is wrong’. In truth, these are just contingent mental frameworks we map onto reality, for better or worse, when the reality without our judgement of it simply is.
Why judge, and more ridiculously try to interfere with, the tides of life?
Cross Current of Life
In a cross-current of life, this letter and song synchronously announce themselves to me, and I am reminded not to pay too much heed to thoughts that issue forth; rather, observe them as the ephemeral spindrift arising from the great churning currents into which I dare not plunge any judgement or expectation.
Rilke asked his young poet, who “had many great sadnesses which have now passed by… to consider whether these great unhappinesses did not rather pass through you.”
It is important to see, I think, any great tide in life in this way; grief and joy, agony and ecstasy, they pass through your inner being, churning currents inside of you that are best left to resolve themselves. Felt, observed, but unsullied and unjudged.
When I find stillness and silence, often a morning overlooking an achingly beautiful swathe of sea off Havelet or Bordeaux or Salarie, I can hear that churn in me, feel a change of tides, and sometimes even sense where the inner current is drawing me.
Being Guernsey folk, we know neither time nor tide wait for us, though they always await us.
To swim against a rip current is foolhardy, you will find yourself drained or drowned in the struggle. It is going to carry you out into the depths whether or not you choose to swim against it; one simply has to stay calm, surrender, and let it happen.
Struggling against a such a current in your inner life, a changing tide, be it grief or heartbreak or growing pains – surrender, let it happen, and you will be released from a point where you can move more freely. Struggling will drain you. Calm is your friend. Fake it to make it if you must; be still, and your calmness will become true for you and radiate to those around you.
I like Rilke’s words, because he marries loss with growth, inner anguish with transition and development.
As within, so without; as one’s inner being develops, so does its outer reality. I think that is how development happens. You have to let it happen.
The Works and Chirps of a Guernseyman 