“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
From “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
Tonight I was feeling some Mary Oliver and thinking about her rhetorical question. But then, is it rhetorical or have I merely rendered it that? Perhaps I have spent too much time mired in the practicality and predictability of modern adult life to consider my life either wild or precious. Perhaps it’s time to change that.
It is a perfectly good time for me to be pondering this question. Having been in transition for some months now I definitely have been in the planning life mode. What am I going to do to earn my livelihood? Where am I going to live? How am I going to create more connection and community with people so I don’t live in isolation? These are all related to the planning part. Sometimes I feel like I’ve gotten too busy with the day-t0-day crunch of surviving that I haven’t carved out enough time to truly sit and contemplate the “what’s next” in my work life, let alone spend time planning and taking considered, measured action toward the plan. My process has been a bit more helter-skelter than that. Envision, plan, do, assess, re-envision seems like a reasonable cycle for moving through one’s life. Unfortunately for me sometimes I jump from envision to take action without bothering to plan or jump around the circle in somewhat random fashion. Or I might spend a really long time in planning and and not doing a whole lot of taking action.
In the scheme of things, what has this to do with anything? Well, if I am pondering what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life then I could easily focus my time an energy on the planning part, when what might really be much more intriguing is the wild and precious part. In fact I have lived a fair chunk of my life doing the right things, playing by the rules that have been laid out for me by family, by society, by church, by the government, etc. There hasn’t been much room for wild and precious.
So yes, I am in a space where planning is important, but the wild and precious is there, hovering at the periphery just on the fringes of my vision. After 50 plus years of living a tame and domesticated life how does one capture the wild and precious? When one knows within oneself that they are called to be different, to live a larger, less careful, perhaps even unplanned and unpredictable, life how does one escape the bounds of safety and predictability to stretch toward the wild and precious? Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Easy for you to say, Ralph. I say to myself. But of course I have no idea whether it was easy for him at all. What I do know is this: there can be a cost to taking a different path, to deviate from plans that were laid out for you, to diverge from the carefully laid out road. Sometimes I feel I’ve done this my whole life.
So now as I continue to contemplate what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life, it is no wonder that am dissatisfied with the planning I’ve been doing. It is solidly situated in the safe and sound. So the task is in part to figure out how to venture out a bit away from the shores of safety without totally plunging into the perils of the rapids. After all, it’s for each of us to figure out for ourselves what “wild and precious” means to us. I’m starting to think I need to figure that out.
Joseph Campbell put it famously when he first used the expression “Follow your bliss.”
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”
I am grateful this evening for contemplation and reflection. In another life I might have been a monastic spending time in retreat or a naturalist like Thoreau spending significant time outdoors, writing and thinking. I am grateful for the time I spend reflecting on the blessings in my life and sharing my thoughts with those who are interested enough to spend a little while with me. This is a journey we’re all on in some form or another. I am happy to share mine with you and to hear from you what you’re learning on yours. Good luck as you ponder for yourself what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.
© M. T. Chamblee, 2012
