“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become aware, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will perhaps find it helpless and nonplussed, perhaps also aggressive. But do not give way, demand arguments and conduct yourself thus carefully and consistently every single time, and the day will dawn when it will become, instead of a subverter, one of your best workmen, – perhaps the cleverest of all who are building at your life.”
Ask it!
Oh how simple, and yet – why do I have the feeling I am not the only one to not have asked my doubt Why, nearly as much as warranted? Demanding proof of it, and thus, giving myself a chance to distance myself from it. A reprieve, making me doubt my doubt, as it were.
I simply never knew I could ask anything of it, taking it as Truth, believing all but the most outrageous statements made by it.
Honestly though, by It here, I don’t just mean my doubt, I mean all my thinking. Whatever thoughts pop into my brain, I do not have to take them at face value. I can ask how it serves me, to believe the message and take action on it. And if the answer is that it doesn’t (or for that matter, that I do not know if it serves me, which to me implies that it doesn’t), I can let it go. At that moment, my mind is truly the cleverest of workmen, building at my life.
#Blogg100 challenge in 2017 – post number 52 of 100.
The book “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke.
English posts here, Swedish at herothecoach.com.