Self-absorption

Rilke in the sixth letter in the collection Letters to a Young Poet writes about the importance of solitude and the normal state of the child to be in touch with necessary solitude.

The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one — this one must be able to attain. To be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child, when the grown ups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they themselves looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doings. [...] why not then continue to look like a child upon it all as upon something unfamiliar, from out of the depth of one's own world, out of the expanse of one's own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation?

Rilke calls the child's state one of "wise incomprehension". Could this be analogous to "beginner's mind"?

And so for day 642
15.09.2008