Your Wild and Precious Life: It’s Okay to be Uncertain
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Somewhere along the way you may have come upon this question before. It’s the final line in Mary Oliver’s famous poem, The Summer Day.
Oliver’s words have been quoted on so many websites and blogs during the past decade that I’ve lost track. In fact, my most potent memory of it is the day when a friend confessed that as much as she loved Mary Oliver, she felt overwhelmed every time she saw the quote,
My friend was so overwhelmed that she hoped to never see the quote again.
Without a doubt there’s an urgency in the question about your wild and precious life.
The minutes, hours, days, months, and years of your one wild and precious life are ticking by even as you read this.
So it makes sense that you might feel an overwhelming urge to figure out what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. Or, it might be about how you’re going to clean up your act or make a fresh start or finally cross everything off that list. (And then immediately get on that road and begin.)
In pondering this question, I have to admit that right now I’m noticing that simply writing those last two sentences brought my body and nervous system into alert mode.
Yet there’s another deeper part of me that knows another truth.
It wants me to tell you that I’ve spent a lot of my wild and precious life being uncertain.
For example, it took me about seven years (from my initial spark of interest) to finally enroll in graduate school to study counseling.
I’ve also wavered consistently, for decades, about where I really want to live. As a result I’ve lived in a lot of different places (and don’t regret it).
Even now, I’m sometimes unsure about how I want to spend my days. And you know what? That’s okay.
Have you considered that your one wild and precious life isn’t asking you to know or do?
Perhaps, instead, it’s asking you to step aside from all the conscious knowing and striving that women are so good at.
Perhaps it’s encouraging you to take the time to drop down into the parts of you that are deep and wise and want your attention.
And then, letting them seep into your life and your days. Stepping into them and letting them influence you to spend more time:
- noticing and engaging with what you’re pulled towards in the moment
- listening on a deeper level to yourself and others
- embracing yourself as you are and practicing self-acceptance
- being with what is rather than needing to fix or figure things out
- practicing the self-care of naming and claiming your own needs
- experiencing the freedom of not having to know everything
- opening up to more playfulness, flow and joy
- believing that it’s okay to begin again each day
In other words, the urgency of your one wild and precious life may be more about starting conversations with the parts of you that you don’t always listen to. And then, paying attention to and honoring their wisdom.
That said, over time I have come to understand there is another player in this story: regret.
Regret is part of what fuels the urgency around our wild and precious lives. You probably know what I mean — the quiet fear of regret — the worry that one day you’ll look back and wish you’d been braver, or faster, or made different choices. But the truth is, regret is rarely something we can avoid. It’s woven into every life honestly lived.
When we can soften toward our regrets, they begin to reveal their own wisdom. Regret shows us what mattered, where we longed to live in greater alignment, or what we now see more clearly.
In that way, regret can become a kind of companion — not a judge, but a guide. It reminds us that this wild and precious life isn’t measured by how fearlessly we leap, but by how honestly we listen, even to the parts of ourselves that wish we’d done it differently.
Thankfully, the heart of this beautiful poem is a plea to pay attention, perhaps as a way to lessen regret.
When you immerse yourself in the poem you see that the urgency of your wild and precious life is in your experience of this moment, right now.
It’s not so much about the urgency of pursuing the future arc of your life or taking immediate action so you can outrun regret. I believe it’s more about relishing the good that is here for you, just a few steps ahead.
Here’s how the poem ends:
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idled 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?
—Mary Oliver
What a relief…you can revel in your wild and precious life even if you’re uncertain.
In fact, it’s normal to be uncertain about what you’re doing or who you’re becoming, particularly during times of life transition.
Also, the truth is many of us aren’t very good at envisioning the external arc of our lives. And when you consider it, would you truly want to? As much as you may yearn to know the future, the story that unfolds is yours alone. You make it as you go along, and it makes you who we are.
And so, you can take your time meandering on the back roads.
You don’t have to know how things will turn out.
You don’t have to be ready.
You can often wait quite awhile before you have to make a final decision.
You can be wishy-washy and confused and ambivalent and resistant. (Which characterizes most people in transition).
Remember: you’re not expected to have a grand plan for your life.
But if someone tells you that you should, question their wisdom and authority.
Because being uncertain about what you’re doing and where you’re going is the story of many women’s lives.
If it’s your story too, and you’ve been comparing yourself to idealized stories of how you’re supposed to be living your one wild and precious life, try to pay attention to what is here for you right now.
Practice showing up for your life each day, in your own imperfect way. Listen to your deeper wisdom about the next small step. Let it unfold. Trust that it’s not your last chance and time isn’t running out.
And hold your regrets close.
Want support embracing your own wild and precious journey and your inherent self-worth?
If you’d like help knowing yourself better and feeling freer to be who you truly are, my free course — Finding Yourself Again — is a good place to start.
My course can help you gain insight on the critical voices and beliefs within you and begin to transform them with creative and imaginative approaches. It’s based on the same practices that have helped my clients reclaim what’s missing and move toward what matters.
And if you have any questions, do get in touch.
