Wild + Precious = ?

In the acknowledgement of absence, head bowed as it may be, there is this:

Lately, I've had a thing for deliberation.

We're not exactly serious yet, we would not dare to be exclusive. But we have met from time to time, over nothing or something, we have shared a history, a knowingness, often awkward but rather intimate encounters.

We have together faced thinking about consciousness, even while in and out of it. How often we've been faced with the odd necessity of decision, forks in the road, words to live by, having a toss-up, rolling the dice. Whatever dice, any dice.

With all of this, I speak only for myself to say I haven't come to any consistent conclusions, which I find is quite usual. What I have found in light of living deliberately, or with deliberation itself, in speaking of drive or even hope, I fear our similarities: that most of us will, eventually, have unknowingly or worse, contentedly, settled for less. We will have existed, even enjoyed, without awareness, without purpose or intention.

So now I'm uncomfortable. I'm on the very edge of the edge, looking from side to never-ending side, and I'm not sure if anyone's standing here with me. I'm dissatisfied with what we wish for and what we do not chase. I am relentlessly opposed to this general preparation for better, the need we have to start small and hope big, to wait and wait and wait until our patience or, pardon me, complacency, instead becomes the very rut where we build our lives, where we cultivate our dullness, where we go no further than our own four corners.

All saving and never spending. For what?

I don't want to be a hundred years old before anything actually happens. I don't want another year or moment to go by before anything actually happens. And wait wait wait. If we're going to talk about occurrences, we might as well breach the tragic predicament of plans. Yes, I've had a thing for plans, too. And though we've since called an end to our off-and-on rendezvous, our somewhat devastating decline got me thinking. I realized how attached I was to the idea of plans. To making them, to planning to make them, to planning how they would be executed. I was thinking about how, though I had no exact timeline in mind, I had certain expectations for the past twenty and the next twenty years of my life. There were marks to hit, give or take the time or schooling or money necessary. There were relationships to foster, roots to cultivate, bonds to break, bags to pack.

There was a world I hadn't seen that demanded my witness.

The funny thing about plans, though, is that they don't matter. Dreams matter, of course. Dreams matter more than anything else you can cling to, should you cling to anything, and I will argue that case with fervency. But plotting them out with any echo of rigidity, deciding when and where and how they will come to be, will most likely leave you hanging. It will make you wonder what went wrong, when really, things only happened. People left or came or securities fell through or guarantees were not so certain or other opportunities were suddenly popping their heads out of the ground, brand new blooms staring up, seeing nothing but sky sky sky. Promising better outcomes, fertile ground, new chances.

So things changed. So plans, whatever they may be, adapted accordingly. Not willingly, at times, but they fell in line, they digressed, they shifted. They sighed and allowed.

So when life intervenes, or excuses itself, or hounds you relentlessly, what will change? Or rather, what is worth changing? What has to happen in order to make you quit your vision, to give up what you really want in exchange for what's already here? What situations will reshape your wants, will make you look to around you, to your empty hands, to convenience and say, well, okay, well this will do.

When I think of these things, these questions that leave us feeling hunted and out of time, Mary Oliver seems to understand us. And by us I mean quite every human being, as we all go racing on and on. She tends to gather our dilemmas, sort them through her musings on nature and then redirect them: to give them back to us in new packaging, wrapped precisely with new hands and new eyes.

She asks so delicately, with such intricate inquisition and sincerity,

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

She acknowledges that you've made lists, that certain checkpoints gather more urgency, that you have general ideas, that you have strong dislikes. She senses our lives as irreplaceable and sweet, with an indelible importance, with equal purpose in what is simple and what is not. Wild and precious may be her biggest compliment to us all.

I don't think she's making fun of us. I think she really wants to know. I think she wants to know if you're going to make a sandwich or read the paper or think about your first love or swear up and down to never drink again. I think our plans, to her, and now to me, involve more than working up to achieve our biggest desires. She wants to know, but what about your every day existence, the ways in which we choose to spend our time, to bask in our time, perhaps our only time, perhaps the very last chance we will ever have to fall asleep on a rainy day or write a letter to a friend now living miles and miles and miles from where we happen to be.

I don't expect too much from anyone. Oliver, I truly sense though truly only guess, feels the same. I don't want to hear about how you will change problems or solve crimes or discover cures. Even though I know you will, it is okay if these things just happen, if we all live by daily choice, if we take the pressure off, if we breathe deep and keep going.

What we want matters. What we think we will accomplish can not only motivate us, but revive us, remind us that in any attempt to discover what we're here for, maybe what we want is all we have to give here and to each other, maybe our goals, however big or small, are our ways of contributing, of progressing, of shifting back, of sharing the weight of living.

So let's live.

Also, I thank you for your patience. Words are, delicately stated, as important as they are unimportant. To me, they are everything. I don't apologize; I continue on.