Click on almost any article with the word “growth” in the title. Invariably each piece will wield the term as a qualifier for material gain or accumulation. Quantity and increase are the values that inform growth’s goals — what can be counted, what compounds into ever greater storehouses of wealth and power.
Granted, said achievements come not without planning, endurance and sacrifice. In the interest of mollifying skeptical readers, I’ve listed a few such articles for their consideration:
“14 Strategies to Accelerate Your Personal Growth By 1000%“
“14 Days to Transform Your Life — Growth Hack Your Way To the Life You’ve Always Wanted“
“Growth Mindset Is a Habit You Want”
“7 Questions That Measure Your Growth As An Adult”
“Programming for Personal Growth”
When facing such overwhelming force of conventional thinking, it remains a challenge not to swim decisively in the opposite direction. Intuition urges that something profound and consequential remains largely unexplored, unexamined.
Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke never led a Fortune 500 company, coached CEOs or wrote a stack of bestsellers chock-full of formulas for growth. The 20th century scribe was a poor artist who often survived off the mercy of various patrons or benefactors.
By a consensus of critics, poets and spiritual thinkers, he’s considered one of the sublime lyrical visionaries writing in the German language last century. Given Rilke’s threadbare existence and commitment to metaphysical values, he stands as one of the most qualified thinkers to deliver a withering response to materialism’s framing of growth.
That reply one may find in his poem called “The Man Watching” (‘Der Schauende’ in German; Robert Bly rendered the translation featured in this essay). The work begins with the scene of an approaching storm. Rilke draws the reader’s attention to the mighty force wrought by nature and how other elements of the ecological world like branches, shrubs or leaves do not resist the onslaught of a tempest. Rather they ride with the wind, as it were.
This particular setting calls to mind Jean de la Fontaine’s pastoral verse titled “The Oak and the Reed.” The 17th century French fabulist imagines a conversation between an oak tree and a nearby reed.
Because of the oak’s great size and strength, he is arrogantly self-assured about his ability to protect the reed whenever a fierce tempest should strike. The reed, relying on contrarian thinking, reminds his neighbor that the tree’s immense size and girth poses a far greater vulnerability. The physics of mass and density do not weigh in favor of the oak.
“I bend and do not break,” the reed solemnly counters the oak’s blustery boasting.
Here’s Rilke’s thinking on the matter of tempests and the battles we are likely to pick:
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
By now everyone has heard the well worn advice about having to “choose your battles wisely.” As a maxim coined in the interest of self preservation, it’s mostly a means by which one guarantees success. And no one can dispute that nothing succeeds like success. We survive in a culture that demands assured and predictable outcomes.
As Rilke views it, humanity has erred on the side of caution. And whatever victory we may achieve, the mediocre size and scope of it shapes the victor by the very same dimensions.
The phrase “We would not need names” may strike the reader as odd, however, I suspect the poet is taking aim at the ego gratification aspect of materialistic growth. Keeping score strikes me as useless pastime if no names are ever uttered. However, purely motivated growth needs no recognition nor seeks it.
As for the idea about how small challenges determine of the diminutive size of one’s achievements, Rilke asserts that the same is true when we face an immense force.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be beaten by us
By a sudden turn in the poem, Rilke calls our attention to a conflict of a very physical quality, but with spiritual consequences.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
The scene referred to by the poet involves the Hebrew patriarch Jacob, who faced off with an angel the night before a fateful confrontation with his brother Esau (biblical commentators suggest the angel in question was Esau’s divine guardian). The striving between human and angel lasts until just before daybreak.
Whoever was beaten by the Angel…
went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape
This visceral description of what Jacob endured in the hands of the angel is no exaggeration, as the Hebrew text states that the patriarch’s thigh had been dislocated. No matter the injury suffered, Jacob walked away an inch or two taller having “seen a divine being face-to-face, yet my life was preserved” (Gen. 32:31).
Rilke closes out the poem by concluding that “Winning does not tempt that man.” Jacob went on to live a full life, plagued by family troubles and heartache. There was no happily-ever-after ending to his story. Winning cannot endure as the destiny of one who experiences true growth. It a hollowing out of depth in the inner life; a place best contoured for such qualities like joy, patience, empathy, et. al,
The final two lines of “The Man Watching” compel a pause from the reader as Rilke wraps up his would-be critique of materialism.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
No benchmark, index nor leaderboard have any use in Rilke’s view of what uplifts humanity. The only comparison worth making, involves the size of the next great defeat — that it should shadow the latest loss.
In contrast to riches or notoriety, Rilke’s notion of growth is intangible; belonging to the world of enduring values and ideas; what cannot be negotiated at point of transaction nor charted in an Excel file; what I would consider a dangerous idea to the world of constantly re-evaluated metrics.
—
Previously Published on Medium
