Teddy (invisabloid)'s first Essay

18 September 2008
Teddy Purnell
Mr. Salsich
Room 2
The Journey of Life
An essay relating a Quote and “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke
Of all the quotes in the hall at Pine Point School, “The Journey is the reward” related best to the poem by Rilke. Both the poem and the quote are not quite clear the first time they are read. If you read it just once, you will not fully understand it, and thus, will not benefit from its true meaning. When I first read the quote, “the journey is the reward”, I thought, “that makes absolutely no sense at all.” Then I repeated the quote a few times in my head, and then it occurred to me that maybe it meant you get more out of a hike than you do looking for treasure. If you're on a hike, you don't usually expect to find anything, and so if you do find something, you'll get more joy out of finding that one, little, minuscule thing than if you expect to find something great, and you don't find anything whatsoever.
I realized that both the quote and the poem talk about a “journey” and “reward” of some kind. In the poem, the journey is living the questions. “Live the questions now. Perhaps then someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” The rewards are the answers to the questions, which you must “live your way into”. In the quote, the journey is the reward and the reward is the journey. They are both the same. It is simple, and yet, on a deeper level, perplexing. The poem and the quote relate to each other, they are different, and so they are alike.
In both the poem and the quote send the same message, “slow down, everything will come to you in the end.” In the quote, the message is sent by an example-yours. You're so focused on finding the true meaning as fast as you can, that you may have overlooked it without noticing the quote is simple at a glance, but you must carefully search for the meaning of it. As for the poem, Rilke tells us, “Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.” You have to be patient when it comes to life, never try to speed through life, but live life to its fullest. Let the answers come to you. One message expressed through two different styles.
Whether this is the message that Rilke and the person who said the quote wanted to send, that I do not know. All I know is that this is the message that they sent to me. I have already learned that they are right, we need to take our time, and do things carefully. Just the experience of writing this-the first essay of the year-proves to me that, ”The journey is the reward”.
--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
--Chinese Proverb, “The Journey is the Reward”