For it is everything, and what it is not is nothing and nowhere.

Get up cheerfully on days you have to work, if you can. And if you can’t, what keeps you from doing so? Is there something heavy that blocks the way? What do you have against heaviness and difficulty? That it can kill you. So it is powerful and strong. This much you know about it. And what do you know about things that are light and easy? Nothing. We have no memory whatsoever of that which was easy and light. So even if you could choose, ought you not actually choose what is difficult? Don’t you feel how it is related to you? . . . And are you not in agreement with nature when you make this choice? Don’t you think a little sapling would have an easier time by staying in the soil? Things that are light and things that are heavy don’t actually exist. Life itself is heavy and difficult. And you do actually want to live? Then you are mistaken in calling it your duty to take on difficulties. It’s your survival instinct that pushes you to do it. So what is duty, then? It is duty to love what is difficult . . . You have to be there when it needs you.

What one writes as a very young person is of no significance whatsoever, just as what else one embarks on has almost no significance. Even the apparently most useless diversions can be a pretext for an inner focusing; one’s nature might even instinctively seize such activities to turn the controlling observation and attention of a curious intellect away from those mental processes that wish to remain unrecognized. One may do anything: only this corresponds to the full scope of life. But one ought to be certain that nothing is done out of opposition, to defy obstructing circumstances, while thinking of others, or based on some kind of ambition. You must be certain that you are acting out of pleasure, strength, courage, or a sheer sense of abandon: that you have to act this way.

In the boundless heavens of work we are afforded one form of bliss that surpasses all others: that something first experienced much earlier is returned to us and can now be grasped and assimilated into the self with the love that has in the meantime grown more just. That is when our divisions begin to be adjusted, when something from the past returns as if from the future; something accomplished as something yet to be completed. And this is the first experience that positions us, out of sequence, at that spot in our heart that is in space and always equidistant from everything and subject to rising and to setting because of the unceasing movement around it . . .

It often happens that I ask myself whether the granting of a wish actually has anything to do with wishes themselves. As long as a wish is weak, it is like one-half of something that needs its being granted as its second half to amount to something independent and whole. But wishes can expand so wonderfully into something that is whole, complete, and intact and that without outside assistance grows into and assumes its shape entirely from within. A particular life’s greatness and intensity might be attributed precisely to its willingness to entertain excessive wishes that would drive as if from the inside action after action, effect after effect into life without much recollection of these wishes’ original aim and intent. Purely elemental, they transformed themselves like cascading water into decisive and genuine acts, immediate existence and cheerful optimism, all depending on what various occurrences and opportunities required.

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.

In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy.