When I toured business schools in 2016, student profiles lined the admissions office of one small school in greater Boston that shall not be named. It featured students’ answers to the question posed in poet Mary Oliver’s One Summer Day, asking, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I remember asking myself how I’d answer the same question, and reading it something like “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one … life?”
Though I have a deep respect for poetry and love playing with words, It isn’t until many years later that I realize the importance of wild and precious, and recognize my fatal omission and total disregard for them all these years in considering that question. Rereading poetry is a bit like rewatching Disney movies; you couldn’t have understood them the same way back then. I’m certain a dictionary wouldn’t have saved me at the time, perhaps this is the sad truth about living and learning.
This life is wild though. And it is precious.
The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
I am trying to live a little wilder. Our capacity for creativity, change and adventure is limitless – or so much broader than we imagine. And yet, habits make it acceptable or easy to clock in and clock out of our lives. Wilder is a little less safety and a little more not giving a f*ck (Mark Manson, I love your work)! What is bothering you most at 10:05am on a Tuesday? If you think you won’t care on your death bed, perhaps you shouldn’t care now.
And it is precious. A pumping heart, oxygenated blood, electrical brain; our health is particularly fragile and precious. Everything we know can be rocked in an instant. Sometimes the rocking is completely outside of our control. And while a lot of people hate ‘Ye, it is indeed true that YOLO.
These realizations about the plan I had for my life coupled with the new realization that it is indeed wild and precious make it pretty hard to get up and behave the same way I did before. If only I could have understood a dozen years ago. But it’s the kind of thing that comes acutely through empirical knowledge, more specifically: pain, loss, grief and suffering. And it’s equally hard to flip a switch in how we live from practicality to YOLO, but it’s important to try.
So where does this leave us? I’m no expert. But I can tell you that this birthday is a harbinger of change, the fact that I get to celebrate it is an immeasurable gift, and tomorrow will not be lived the same as yesterday. Idle and blessed. Hopefully a little wilder.