Your One Wild & Precious Life.
Mary Oliver once asked,
“tell me, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?”
This quote has followed me into the new year and I am hoping to hold onto it through 2022.
So many parts of this quote speak to me.
Your one precious life:
I was born into a culture that believes a soul travels through multiple lifetimes, in each gathering the lessons it needs to learn. Some believe we never really die, that our energy just transforms from one form to another. Some believe we exist only in the time and space of our current physical bodies. Whatever our different beliefs, most can agree that this life – in this body and consciousness, living in this time and circumstances – will only happen once.
What is more true is the rarity, and hence miracle, of this birth; this life we get to live, this person we get to be, had to fight so many odds to even exist.
In addition, and perhaps most poignant for me is, all the lives we encounter are all just as rare and precious. What an incredible gift it all is.
Your wild life:
This may be my favorite part.
I think it is the most important part.
Wild.
As we get older, we tend to trade wild for comfort. We want certainty, predictability, and protection from pain. Our spirits, however, were born for the wild; they were built to strive and stretch and grow. To create, expand, and transcend. Fear, comparison, and loss of faith in ourselves has made us small. We have forgotten we can do hard things. We need belonging but have forgotten to belong to ourselves first. We have abandoned courage for a diluted sense of safety.
Wholehearted living, living fully in accordance with our full capacity for love, joy, and creativity, requires us to unleash the bars of safety and truly commit to life:
I am here. I am ready to live. I am ready to give all, to feel all, to love, to risk. To be so fully me with all that is wild within me and know I am strong enough, knowing enough, compassionate enough, flexible enough to transform all that comes my way into an experience for me to learn from, grow from, and expand further from.
So many things we do to keep ourselves safe in reality keeps us bound.
This is what I have learned to be true in my own life:
If you are unwilling to feel sadness, you restrict your band of emotion which not only cuts off pain, but must also limit your capacity for joy.
If you are unwilling to risk falling, you give up becoming a full manifestation of the power, talent, or potentiality of which you are capable.
If you fear conflict and challenge, you will never meet the pushback you need to continue to learn and grow.
If you are unwilling to risk criticism, dissent, or unpopularity, you will never be able to fully express your truth.
Without authenticity, you will never feel truly connected.
If there is no belonging, meaning, or sense of purpose, we wither; but there is no belonging, meaning, or purpose without risk of hurt, loss, failure, disappointment, frustration, and exposure.
If you have no compassion for yourself, you will never be able to look at your flaws without defense, and if you are unwilling to accept your own flaws, you will never be able to overcome them. Self-acceptance ironically is the seat of change; without it there is no holding ground for true self-analysis, apology, forgiveness, compassion, love, or growth.
If we focus on protecting ourselves, we invariably hurt others. We create barriers to connection, or worse, externalize pain we don’t want to feel.
Everything I described above requires vulnerability – an opening of oneself to both the hard and soft of life. It is wildness, losing that protective layer so you can fully experience, express, challenge, grow, and invest in this one precious life journey we are lucky enough to be given.
I listen to a podcast called Being Well a lot; the perspectives of the two hosts traverse the areas of mindfulness, psychology, well-being, and philosophy, a mix I love. One of the hosts said something in a recent episode that really hit me. He was talking about a realization he had in his young adult years, during a period in which he was really languishing; he was experiencing an existential crisis of sorts and what eventually got him out was a realization that he had never quite committed to life. He decided then to fully commit, to give himself - full, vulnerable, heart and soul - to this existence. Thank goodness he did.
So, I wondered of myself, have I fully committed? And though I am in my (early) 50s, I think my answer would have to be ‘no’. I have been protecting myself from hurt (that sometimes was never there), from criticism (by not putting my thoughts, ideas, myself out there), failure (by playing small). I have not risked living wild.
A wild heart is a heart willing to be vulnerable and open so it can feel, experience, risk all to love more fully, authentically, and compassionately. It is our gateway to joy, meaning, purpose, and true connection.
I want those things more than I want safety. It has taken me a while to get here, but this year I want to be truly wild. You?
Tell me, what will you do…?