No one lives his life.
Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled from voices and fears and little pleasures, we come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.
Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armour or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.
Maybe all the paths lead there to the repository of unlived things.
And yet, though you and I struggle against this deathly clutch of daily neccesity,
I sense there is this mystery
All life is being lived.
Who is living it then?
Is it the things themselves, or something waiting inside them, like an unplayed melody in a flute?
Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?
Is it the flowers interweaving their frangrances or streets, as they wind through time?
Is it the animals, moving, or the birds, that suddenly rise up?
Who lives it then?
God, are you the one who is living life?
~Rilke
