Mary Oliver concludes her famous poem “The Summer Day” with the following line:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I read that line over and over again when I first came across the poem. I read it in my head; I repeated it out loud.
The more I read it, the more my thoughts started to spiral. What did I want to do with my one wild and precious life? When would I know for sure? Should I be planning everything out? It was as though I told myself that the more I read it, the more clarity I would have and the more I would know the answer to these questions.
Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a planner. I map out my upcoming week each Sunday – my days are meticulously planned out in my calendar, and I live by my Todoist app. At one point in my life, I even advocated for the five-year plan and the value of setting goals for what I wanted to accomplish each year.
But despite my planning idiosyncrasies, this question led me to believe that a complete wild and precious life – from beginning to end – can’t be fully planned out (mostly because I was having such a hard time doing so). I think, to a certain degree, one can have an idea of where they hope to go and where they hope to end up, but at the end of the day, there are so many factors in life that are out of your control.
A wild and precious life cannot be completely predicted.
A wild and precious life will have uncertainties in it.
A wild and precious life is meant to have twists and turns.
There will be things that will come as a surprise. There will be paths that you can’t see coming. There will be moments that you cannot schedule or pencil into your calendar.
I realized this while thinking about the stretch of time we still have ahead of us. It’s so difficult to chart out what we want our life to be like for the rest of our lives. Whether it’s the person we want to marry, the city we want to end up in, the career we want to have, or the person we want to become, it’s impossible for those to not change as we go (and grow) through life. Everything is bound to change, the ship is bound to be steered off course for a little bit, and not everything will go the way you had maybe intended it to be.
The reason this question resonated with me so much is that at this point in our lives, we’re told we need to have it all figured out– career-wise, relationship-wise, life-wise – but we’re not told how temporary our plans are.
However, I think a lot of the beauty and excitement of life lies in the surprises – in the pockets of life that you’re not always ready for. If you knew everything that was going to happen in your one wild and precious life, would it be as wild and as precious? And so, you must be open to these moments that may not necessarily be written down in your original plans – and sometimes, you must be willing to go where the wind is blowing.
A lot of the beauty lies in the “hello”s and laughs with people you never expected to meet. It lies in the destinations that are off the beaten road. It lies in the unexpected moves to new cities, and in taking a job opportunity that wasn’t originally on your radar.
So, tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I hope you have an inkling of an idea of what you want to do, but I also hope you can’t give me a full answer. I hope that you remain open to the possibility of what your one wild and precious life can be and where it can take you, and so, when you look back, you’ll be able to say to yourself,
“Oh, so, that’s what I did with my one wild and precious life.”