Brain Food #784: The act of gestation

'The dots will somehow connect'

Thoughts of the day

In the spirit of slow reading, the start of a new week, and a new list of tasks to complete, today’s post is about letting things take their time.

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke often talks about patience, and leaving room for clarity to arrive:

“Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.”

The act of gestation looks like doing nothing superficially, and might be difficult to value or even notice in a world in which we are increasingly measured by tangible outputs. But even if the ocean looks calm, there is so much happening beneath the surface. Similarly, we should have faith in the process, even if the process is internal, and not as obvious to us. As Steve Jobs famously said, “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

The letters were not originally intended for publication, but they were published three years after Rilke’s death by Franz Kappus, his young correspondent. In the patient act of writing each letter and waiting for the response to arrive (Rilke’s letters, ten in total, were sent over a period of six years), a masterpiece was slowly, unknowingly born. Rilke could not have imagined that, more than one hundred years later, we are still learning from it.

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