"Rilke on How Great Sadnesses Bring Us Closer to Ourselves"

"His words vibrate with double poignancy a century later, amid a culture where to be uncertain is the greatest sin of all — never mind that uncertainty is the crucible of self-transcendence; a culture that has commodified the cultivation of happiness and industrialized the eradication of sadness:
The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary — and toward this our development will move gradually—that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us."
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/10/rilke-letters-to-a-young-poet-sadness/

Related: “How I Learned To Be OK With Feeling Sad”