The Work of Struggle, the Work of Love

On embracing resistance, and what it actually means to give someone your attention.

Rilke, writing to a young poet wrestling with doubt, had little patience for the easy resolutions people reach for. He saw most of what passes for “resolving” life’s hard questions as a kind of shortcut: settling things on whatever the easiest side of easy happens to be.

His argument is simple but not soft: struggle isn’t something to escape, it’s the basic condition every living thing answers to. A tree doesn’t establish itself without pushing against wind, drought, and competition for light. A person doesn’t establish an identity without resistance either; it takes insisting on who they are against whatever pushes back.

“The need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

We can be sure of very little in life, in other words. But that pull toward meeting resistance rather than avoiding it doesn’t go away.

What It Means to Attend

There’s a second idea worth sitting with alongside this one, about what it actually means to love someone.

To love, whether it’s another person or yourself, is to extend toward them. That’s not just a metaphor. The English word attend comes from the Latin tendere, to stretch. To attend to someone is, literally, to stretch toward them.

Which means giving someone real attention is truly an extension of ourselves. And that lines up uncomfortably well with Rilke’s point: extending yourself toward another person means doing exactly the thing that’s hardest to do. Showing up fully for someone, again and again, asks for the same muscle as standing firm in who you are. Both are forms of struggle. Both are, in their own way, what it means to grow.

Holding Both

Struggle and tenderness don’t usually get filed under the same heading, but maybe they belong together. The same willingness to stay, with what’s difficult in yourself and stretched toward someone else, is what makes both possible.