Just read these passages from Rilke’s eighth letter to Mr. Kappus:

…we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; beccause we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

…learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them. Only because so many have not absorbed their destinies and transmuted them within themselves while they were living in them, have they not recognized what has gone forth out of them; it was so strange to them that, in their bewildred fright, they thought it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear never before to have found anything like it in themselves.

From the M.D. Herter Norton translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, revised edition copyright 1954 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.