Your future lurks within you.

There's a new book that publishes for the first time the classic Rainer Maria Rilke "Letters to a Young Poet" along with the actual letters OF the "young poet" Franz Kappus to Rilke.  The New Yorker reviews it here.   

“What we call fate,” Rilke wrote to Kappus, “emerges from out of the person, it doesn’t impinge on the person from without.” This is an extraordinary idea about fate.  It's like what you CAN BE or WILL BE because of your character and choices.  And it carries with it the idea that we will become that thing... but it might take some time.  “The future is stationary,” Rilke wrote. “It is we who are moving in infinite space.” 

New Yorker writer Kamran Javadizadeh reflects, "There’s something frightening about being addressed in this way, about being told that your future lurks within you, but that you will have become a different person once it has emerged. This is a strange way to imagine the flow of time."  And it's a strange way of thinking who we are.  

In the final lines of  the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Rilke writes: “You must change your life.”  But this line comes after a long reflection on a headless statue which is able to communicate through all of the parts of itself... that there is no need for the head to be expressive of what it is.  A better, fuller quotation, then, is "for here there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life."  Your character will emerge.  You must change your life to achieve your fate.

Javadizadeh begins the article with a reflection on letter writing.  I don't know if he means to connect this to Rilke's letters specifically or not, but it seems apt:  "To hold a letter addressed to you and see your own name in another’s hand is to feel an unsettling kind of pleasure. Even before you’ve opened the envelope, your identity has been refracted through someone else’s. The invitation is both estranging and thrilling: Could you become the person whose name you read there?"  Letters, because they contain the image of you from another, often a idealized version of you, call to you like fate.

According to the NYT, anticipating a vacation provides mood boosting mental health benefits.  But you can't plan too far in advance.  The issue is that we begin to think of ourselves as other people.

You need time to cultivate anticipation. But not too much time. The problem with things that lie in the future, researchers have found, is that we almost think of our future selves as other people. Dr. Dunn, for example, said she essentially thinks of her older, retired self as a different person. And it’s difficult to get excited about a distant, future self. But, she said, planning a trip with a “reasonable length of runway” (maybe a year as opposed to five years away) still feels like you’re the one who will be taking it.

I'm wondering about that notion of thinking about our future selves as other people.  While it might not be good for vacation planning, it might serve other purposes, allowing ourselves to get some distance for that person so that we can change.