That feeling you can’t quite name
Falling in love is both incredibly tender and terrifying — that moment when someone starts taking up so much space in your thoughts, and you’re left not quite sure what to do with all that overwhelming feeling.
I’ve been married for twenty years now, so I don’t experience that specific, heart-racing sensation in my actual life anymore. But I’m a huge fan of Korean dramas, and every time I watch a romance unfold, that long-lost feeling from my youth comes rushing back — the swaying between joy and anxiety, like standing at the edge of something vast and unknown. Even secondhand, I often finish an episode with my heart so tight and feverish that I can barely focus on chores or work for a while afterward.
Today’s Words
Sobald wir das anerkennen, daß auch zwischen den nächsten Menschen unendliche Fernen bestehen, kann ein wunderbares Nebeneinanderleben entstehen.
“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke · Austria/Bohemia · 1904
Advice written to a stranger who asked for it
Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the most beloved German-language poets of the early twentieth century. Born in Prague in 1875, he lived a long, restless life — moving between cities, between loves, between stretches of deep loneliness and sudden bursts of beauty. He never quite settled anywhere, which might be part of why he wrote so honestly about the space between people.
This line comes from Letters to a Young Poet, a series of letters Rilke wrote to a young man named Franz Xaver Kappus, who had written to him asking for guidance about love, art, and life. Rilke was only in his late twenties at the time, but these words read like they came from someone who’d already thought hard about what it actually means to be close to another person. The letters were later published and have been read by people all over the world ever since.
The distance we keep trying to close
In the middle of falling for someone, it’s almost impossible to think clearly about any of this. The heart is restless, the mind keeps circling back to one person, and everything feels more vivid and more fragile at once.
I work with students every day, and I see this play out constantly. It’s strange how clear things can look from the outside while staying completely invisible to the person actually living through them. No matter how obvious something seems from a distance, there’s a lot we simply can’t see when we’re inside the intensity of our own feelings.
I think most of us carry a quiet anxiety about this. We wonder whether distance means something is wrong — that they don’t love us enough, or we don’t love them enough. We go looking for proof of closeness, and sometimes the searching itself creates the very tension we’re trying to avoid.
Rilke says something quieter than that. The distance is real, he says, and it’s always there. But actually accepting it — not just tolerating it, actually accepting it — is what lets something beautiful grow between two people. Once we stop trying to erase the space between us and instead learn to live gently beside each other inside it, love turns into something quieter and more lasting.
There’s something both a little sad and deeply comforting in that. We’re all, in some sense, alone inside ourselves. Two people who accept each other’s aloneness — who don’t demand the other person fill every empty corner — can build something that holds. Something that doesn’t collapse the first time one of them has a feeling they can’t explain, or a piece of their history they haven’t shared yet.
We usually describe falling in love as falling toward someone. Rilke seems to be describing something closer to standing beside them — not merged into one person, but close enough to feel each other’s warmth across a distance that never fully closes.
You don’t have to make sense of it tonight
Rilke’s words might not land fully right now, and that’s fine. Some ideas take years to settle. Maybe someday you’ll remember this quote in a quiet moment — sitting beside someone you love, not talking, just existing together — and it’ll feel like something you already knew without needing the words for it.
For now, it’s enough to just be where you are. In the feeling. In the not-knowing. That space between people, uncertain and a little overwhelming as it is, is also where some of the most tender things in life get started.
From Japan —A word that means “paper written by hand”
In Japanese, the word for letter is tegami — literally, “paper written by hand.”
In an age of instant messages and email, we’ve traded patience for speed almost without noticing. But there’s something a handwritten letter does that nothing else quite manages: it honors distance instead of trying to erase it. The person isn’t physically there, but their handwriting is — the pressure of the pen, a small ink smudge, some tiny imperfection that carries a piece of them straight to you.
I can star an important email and file it away, but I still prefer tying old letters together with a ribbon and tucking them in a drawer. There’s a kind of sentiment in that which no technology quite replicates. Maybe that’s one way into what Rilke meant — that even across the vast, infinite distance between two people, something warm and alive can still travel through the gap and reach the other side.
