08 Jan One Wild and Precious Life
January has a way of making us restless. The year opens up with an immediate ask for more intention, more focus, and more goals. The stores and the screens promise a better life if we meet the year with more effort.
I remember my last semester of college, some 25 years ago, carrying that same energy. A room full of seniors in January is a room leaning forward. We were itching to graduate, to go somewhere else, to become something, with futures pressing against our backs.
I think our literature professor sensed it. One morning, with a small, knowing smile, he brought up Mary Oliver’s question: What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? It sounded like a dare and we answered eagerly, sharing our ideas and plans, all the ways we imagined filling our lives with meaning and momentum and as much living as possible.
He listened, smiling, and nodding. Then he gently shifted the conversation, explaining that Oliver’s answer to her own question was to walk through fields, kneel in the grass, and look with awe at a grasshopper with its enormous and complicated eyes.
It all sounded wise, but it felt like something meant for later. Like a way of being you grew into once the real and important work was done. It wasn’t meant for now. Certainly not in January.
For so many years, I carried the question forward that way and started each new year charging ahead. But more and more, each January, I find myself thinking about that classroom and feeling Oliver’s words tugging at my sleeves, reminding me that a wild and precious life is not something on the other side of accomplishment. It may be what we miss when we are caught up in January’s lesson to do more and become more.