It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.

Rilke contrasts the deadening repetition of habitual relationships with the vitality that comes from openness to the unknown. What makes love and friendship “monotonous,” he suggests, is not mere laziness but a defensive fear: we avoid experiences that might unsettle us or demand capacities we doubt we possess. To meet another person as truly “alive” requires a willingness to be changed by what cannot be predicted or neatly understood—even what feels “enigmatical.” The passage reflects Rilke’s broader ethic of inward growth: genuine relation is not control or comfort, but a courageous hospitality to uncertainty, where the self risks vulnerability in order to encounter the other as irreducibly new.