Do not expend too much courage or time to clarify your position to others. I know your career is difficult and I anticipated your complaint and knew it would come. Now that it has come, I cannot reassure you.
I can only advise you to think seriously about this: Are not all careers the same, filled with demands and people filled with animosity toward the individual, at the same time absorbing the hatred of those who have silently and sullenly adapted to dull duty?
The situation that you are now obligated to tolerate is not burdened any heavier with conventions, prejudices, and errors than any other situation. If there are some who outwardly give the impression of granting more freedom, know that there really exists none that is related to the important things that make up real life.
The individual person who senses his aloneness, and only he, is like a thing subject to the deep laws, the cosmic laws.
If a person goes out into the dawn or gazes out into the evening filled with happenings, if he senses what happens there, then all situations fall away from him as from someone dead, even though he stands in the midst of life.
You must realize that you would have felt the same way in any existing career now.
[...] It is the same everywhere, but that is not a reason for fear or sadness.
If there seems to be no communication between you and the people around you, try to draw close to those things that will not ever leave you.
The nights are still there and the winds that roam through the trees and over many lands.
Amidst things and among animals are happenings in which you can participate.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters To A Young Poet: The Possibility of Being"
I can only advise you to think seriously about this: Are not all careers the same, filled with demands and people filled with animosity toward the individual, at the same time absorbing the hatred of those who have silently and sullenly adapted to dull duty?
The situation that you are now obligated to tolerate is not burdened any heavier with conventions, prejudices, and errors than any other situation. If there are some who outwardly give the impression of granting more freedom, know that there really exists none that is related to the important things that make up real life.
The individual person who senses his aloneness, and only he, is like a thing subject to the deep laws, the cosmic laws.
If a person goes out into the dawn or gazes out into the evening filled with happenings, if he senses what happens there, then all situations fall away from him as from someone dead, even though he stands in the midst of life.
You must realize that you would have felt the same way in any existing career now.
[...] It is the same everywhere, but that is not a reason for fear or sadness.
If there seems to be no communication between you and the people around you, try to draw close to those things that will not ever leave you.
The nights are still there and the winds that roam through the trees and over many lands.
Amidst things and among animals are happenings in which you can participate.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters To A Young Poet: The Possibility of Being"
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