You must change your life…

Rainer Marie Rilke, the Austrian poet, was at one point in time the private secretary of the French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, and ended up writing a monograph about the sculptor.

The relationship between the elder artist and the apprentice poet proved to be one of the most fruitful periods for Rilke, transforming his early poetry best expressed in The Book of Hours, a very emotive and subjective collection, into what Rilke called “thing-poems” in New Poems.

These are some of Rilke’s highest achievements in his poetry and are often anthologized, especially “The Panther” and “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” where I took the title of this post. 

This relationship changed how Rilke viewed the world and the art objects role in it.

From Rodin, he learned to see the object of representation as a world complete, objective, and part of a larger world, like how each Russian nesting doll is a complete figure in relation to every other figure in differing size, at once separate and contained within itself and yet still dependent and contained in a larger whole.

The vision in these poems becomes something very objective, as if the speaking subject of the poem is in front of the “thing”, the object, the poem is describing but has become an actual component of the composition.

The speaker is implied in the poems, but remains an integral facet and cannot be in anyway divorced from it, objective and subjective combine, “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.”

For here there is no place that does not see you.

How true that line is in the grand scheme of things.

What is done in the dark always comes to the light, and what was hidden is always revealed.

I spoke to an old colleague of mine who I haven’t spoken to in a few years today.

She shared with me of having had the same experience of people in my former industry of door to door sales that I have had.

As you can imagine in door to door sales there’s a low barrier to entry and with straight commission it often attracts people who are money hungry, so it can create some circumstances where a lot of money is generated and relationships can get in the way of people‘s profits.

I’ve had my fair share of being in positions that weren’t profitable to me, and have heard some absolute horror stories.

Sometimes it seems as if the people outside of ourselves do not change.

That there is no place that does not see them, and yet when we look to ourselves we see that we have changed, we have self-determination.

But who knows and who truly can really know themself.

It seems as if this is the case, but how often have we felt like we have changed.

Forged something new and complete within ourselves only to run into an old friend who says something to the effect of “you’re still the same old you, you haven’t changed one bit.”

Maybe this is why our current culture is so obsessed with the visual change, as if changing hair color or our clothe’s aesthetics could effect a deep psychological change. 

And yet as much as one wants to deny it, there is a performative aspect of personality.

Stepping into that new role, whether a change in hair color or a new fashion sense, a new job outfit, charges how we perform around others.

I know for myself being a naturally very introverted person putting on my company branded polos and hats and name tag was like putting on the costume of a character in a play, where I would act like the extroverted person interested in the person I was talking to and subtly guiding them to where I needed them to go.

After work, when I’d remove the costume I would go back to the type of personality I am naturally inclined towards, one who prefers solitude.

But this performative piece of my personality, this charismatic and dynamic individual who can pour attention and interest on others, isn’t something somehow separate from me, it is a wholly formed component within this grander structure of what is myself. 

The interesting thing about this is it took active cultivation to bring this sort of personality out.

I read books on social skills, on talking to others, on charisma and developing an attractive personality only because when I came into door to door sales I felt like I was so far behind everyone else who had been in sales or customer relations in some form or other their whole career.

Whereas I sought to avoid it and choose a career where I could avoid people.

The thing with social skills, just like sales skills or marketing skills or whatever type of skill is that they are learnable.

These aren’t inherent traits we either have or don’t, they are a set of practices that we can actively cultivate and grow into.

I used to tell my sales reps when I was training them that no mother every gave birth to a salesman, that everything about the profession is learned. 

And despite this ability to grow and determine ourselves some of us surely are stuck with the characters we have chosen to cultivate, or perhaps the circumstances of our early lives have thrust upon us a character which can be quite advantageous in some respects but cause a lot of harm in other situations.

However one wants to argue it, the chicken or the egg, there does seem to be people who continually show the same character throughout time, my experience of this or that person seems to match up with others experience of that same individual throughout a time period.

I guess it is those individuals that we learn more about ourselves through setting boundaries and what we will tolerate, perhaps that is why they’ve appeared in our lives.

To show us ourselves, of what we want to be or how we dont want to be, of what we allow within our own little circle of the universe, for every relation is always a mirror for ourselves.

Or as Rilke said, “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.”

• “One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience”…
• William Munny, Unforgiven, and the making of the narratives we tell ourselves, Part 3…
• About
• In my end is my beginning…
• The Chaos of Life: Why ‘God Doesn’t Build a Staircase to Nowhere’

If this resonates, dive deeper into The Poetics of Fulfillment—a field guide for those restless for more than fleeting happiness. Not quick fixes, but lasting meaning. If you crave depth over dopamine and want fulfillment that endures, this is your next step.

Read The Poetics of Fulfillment: Why Chasing Happiness Is Killing Your Fulfillment (And How to Stop) 

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