The young man expressed his admiration for Rilke's poetry and told him that he envied him, envied his life in a big city, and envied a life so full of insight and richness. He went on to describe how his own life was uninteresting, provincial, small-town, too dull to inspire insight and poetry. Rilke's answer was not sympathetic. There are no uninteresting places, no lives that aren't full of the stuff for poetry. What makes for a rich life is not so much what is contained within each moment, since all moments contain what's timeless, but sensitive insight and presence to that moment.
Poetry is about being sufficiently alert to what's in the ordinary.
Augustine was lucky, the clock never ran out on him. Sometimes we aren't as lucky, our health and our lives must be radically threatened or taken from us before we realize how rich these in fact already are, if only we made ourselves more present to them. If everything were taken away from us and then given back, our perspective would change drastically. Victor Frankl, the author of Man's Search for Meaning, like Augustine, also was lucky. He had been clinically dead for a few minutes and then revived by doctors.