Let Everything Happen to You

There’s a particular kind of poet that only starts to make sense once you’ve lived long enough to be ambushed by your own life. Rainer Maria Rilke is one of them.

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final

At twenty, this verse reads like permission. At thirty-five, it reads like instruction. By fifty, it’s closer to recognition. you realise he isn’t suggesting a philosophy so much as describing the terrain you’re already walking through, whether you like it or not.

Midlife has a way of stripping the varnish off things. Like stones beneath the seasons, we become weathered by time. We wake up one day and notice that the stories we told ourselves, about who would be and how things would turn out, have given way to something else entirely.

And in their place, there’s a different kind of clarity. Less negotiable. For me, that’s where Rilke lands.

Let everything happen to you.

This sounds gentle. It isn’t. What Rilke is describing is a kind of radical openness, a willingness to experience reality without immediately editing it.

The author Albert Camus gets to the same place by taking a different road. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he describes the absurd condition of humankind: we want meaning, yet the universe does not provide it. Most people spend their lives trying to resolve that tension, either by inventing meaning or by numbing themselves to the question.

Camus suggests something harsher and cleaner: accept the tension. Stop arguing with reality. Live inside it. That’s Rilke’s “let everything happen.”

By midlife, you’ve probably noticed how much energy goes into not letting things happen. Avoidance dressed up as discernment. Control disguised as planning. You learn which conversations to sidestep, which risks to decline, which hopes to quietly retire.

It works, for a while. But it also shrinks the room you’re living in.

Rilke’s point is that most people inhabit only a corner of themselves. Letting everything happen is how you expand the space again. It’s how you stay permeable to life, even after it’s given you reasons not to be.

Of course, that raises an obvious objection: everything includes things you don’t want, which brings us to the second line.

Beauty and terror

Early in life, we treat these as separate categories. Beauty is what we pursue. Terror is what we avoid. Simple enough. Then life complicates the picture.

Edmund Burke, writing about the sublime, noticed this long before Rilke. The sublime isn’t just beauty, it’s beauty mixed with vastness, danger, and a loss of control.

This feeling is more than the uncertain glory of a sunny day in early Spring. It’s what you feel standing at the edge of something too large to fully comprehend. A mountain, perhaps, or witnessing an incoming storm from across the sea, a moment that reminds you how small you are.

Rilke sharpens that idea: beauty is not separate from terror. It’s entangled with it. In the Duino Elegies, he goes further: beauty is the beginning of terror.

That sounds dramatic until you’ve lived it. Love is beautiful and terrifying, because it exposes you to loss. Parenthood is beautiful and terrifying, because you cannot ultimately protect what you love. Building something meaningful is beautiful and terrifying, because it can fail, or end, or be taken.

Midlife is where this duality becomes unavoidable. You don’t get to pretend anymore that you can have one without the other. The cost of admission is clearer now.

And something shifts. You stop trying to separate them so cleanly. You begin to understand that shutting out terror doesn’t make you safer, it just makes you less alive. It dulls the edge of beauty at the same time.

So you hold both, consciously. And just when that tension starts to feel uncomfortable, Rilke lowers the temperature.

Just keep going

This is where philosophy meets Tuesday afternoon.

Because after all the abstractions (existentialism! the sublime! the nature of reality!) you still have to get through the day. Ralph Waldo Emerson understood this in his own way. In Self-Reliance, he talks about trusting your own path, even when it doesn’t make sense to anyone else, (including you, sometimes).

This is a form of defiance. Not rebellion for its own sake, but a refusal to let a single moment, especially a difficult one, define the whole trajectory of your life.

“Just keep going” is the least glamorous advice you’ll ever get. It doesn’t promise transformation. It doesn’t even promise improvement. It promises continuity. It’s modern counterpart would be a “Keep calm and carry on” poster I suppose. We wake up, we do the next thing. We don’t assume the story is over because a chapter went sideways.

This is where the stoics quietly nod. Not because they believed in suppressing emotion, contrary to the stereotype, but because they understood that forward motion matters. You don’t control everything that happens. You do control whether you stop entirely.

And in midlife, stopping has a particular temptation to it. Not physically. Existentially. You can plateau. You can narrow your world. You can decide, without quite saying it out loud, that the interesting part is over. “Just keep going” pushes against that.

I hear echoes in the phrase “Don’t let the old man in” which we have chosen as the name of our flagship podcast for men navigating midlife. It comes from a story Clint Eastwood tells about visiting a friend who, despite his age, was still active, curious, and engaged with life. Eastwood asked him what his secret was, and the man replied simply: every morning when he wakes up, he asks himself, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”and then he goes out and lives that way.

Eastwood took that idea to heart, later sharing it with Toby Keith, who turned it into a song for a movie called The Mule. At its core, that song is not about denying age or pretending time hasn’t passed. Rather, it’s about refusing the quiet surrender that can come with it, the internal voice that says you’re done growing, done trying, done showing up.

The “old man” isn’t your body; it’s the part of you that wants to sit down before the game is actually over. Instead, we must keep going. Don’t let the old man in. And yet, even as we embrace this nourishing idea, Rilke gives us the line that ties the whole thing together:

No feeling is final

This is where Arthur Schopenhauer, of all people, becomes useful. He saw life as an oscillation between desire and boredom, between striving and dissatisfaction. Not exactly uplifting. But he was right about one thing: emotional states don’t hold still. They move. They cycle. They shift, whether you cooperate or not.

Rilke takes that observation and turns it into something more liveable. If no feeling is final, then despair isn’t a permanent residence. It’s a phase. A convincing one, sometimes. A long one, occasionally. But not the end state.

The same goes for joy, which is the quieter warning embedded in the line. You don’t get to freeze the good parts either. Trying to possess them too tightly is another way of resisting reality.

So what’s left? Participation. You feel what you feel, without rushing to declare it permanent. You let it move through you, without immediately turning it into identity.

This is harder than it sounds. By midlife, you’ve accumulated enough experience to start building conclusions. This is how things go.This is who I am now.This is what’s left.

Rilke is gently dismantling that tendency. You are not finished. Your emotional life is not fixed. The story has not settled into its final shape. Even now, especially now, things are still in motion.

And if we step back, what emerges from these four lines isn’t a single philosophy, but a convergence.

From existentialism, we get acceptance of reality without illusion. From romanticism, we get the recognition that awe and fear are intertwined. From stoicism, we get the discipline to continue regardless of circumstance. From a more pessimistic lens, we get the understanding that emotional states are transient.

Put together, they form something like a working model for midlife: Stay open. Accept the full range. Keep moving. Don’t mistake the present feeling for the final truth. Don’t let the old man in.

This is not comforting in the traditional sense. Rilke doesn’t promise that things will work out neatly, or that suffering has a clear purpose. These lines of verse offer something more useful. They remove the unnecessary layer of resistance.

And once that’s gone, what remains is a sturdier kind of life. Not free of difficulty, but less distorted by the need to avoid it. Not free of beauty, but less desperate to hold onto it.

You begin to inhabit your life more directly. Which, in the end, might be what Rilke was after all along. A more honest story and maybe, on a good day, a way forward.

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This post was previously published on The Wisdom Vault and is republished on Medium.

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