string bean theory

And this is why it is so important to be alone and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and fixed moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other loud and fortuitous point of time at which, as from outside, it happens to us. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly the new goes into use, so much the better do we take it to ourselves, so much the more will it be our destiny, and we shall, when on some later day it "happens" (that is, goes forth out of us to others), feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary.

- Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet