Your One Wild and Precious Life
Tell me.
I lost some sleep this week.
I’m in the habit of turning off all my screens at 9pm, and going to bed with a good book. Usually this means I’m asleep by 10pm, all comfy and snug under my duvet with a little lavender oil scenting the air from my diffuser, and I sleep through for most of the night until about 6am.
I LOVE a good night’s sleep and because it’s what I’m used to, when I don’t get those delicious 8 hours of sleep, I really feel their absence – even a few hours off my quota and I’m cranky and craving carbs like a bear fresh out of its cave in Spring.
This week: oof, it hurt. Here’s what happened…
Four Thousand Weeks, or Less
Last weekend in The Writer’s Flow Studio we had one of our mindset masterclasses, on the topic of “deep work.” One of the writers [waves to Kim!] recommended a new book on productivity that came out last year, called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
If you know me at all, you know I bought that book. And honestly, it terrified me just a little.
The idea behind the book’s title is that we all have a limited lifespan so therefore it’s urgent that we make the most of it, and we can do that by re-examining our culture’s obsession with time and productivity. But it begins with basic math…
Four thousand weeks equals about 76 years of life. Think of this as adult life in good physical and mental health, and I think it’s possibly fewer than that.
If you start writing seriously at 20 and put your pen down when you turn 80, you actually only have 3,120 weeks.
And I turned 50 last year, so… I probably only have about 1,500 weeks left, if I’m writing until I’m 80. Assuming I stay healthy, of course.
How did all these weeks disappear so suddenly? And where did they all go?
You can see why I had trouble sleeping.
What Is It You Plan To Do
There’s a quote from a poem I love that makes regular rounds on the internet. When I tell you this quote, you’ll know it immediately and you might even know who wrote it.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Those are the last two lines from The Summer Day, a poem by Mary Oliver first published in her collection House of Light (Beacon Press, 1990.)
If you didn’t know of Mary Oliver until today YOU’RE MOST WELCOME! :-) She’s one of America’s most beloved poets. Here are a few more you’ll love by her:
(Oh, heck – just buy a whole book! Here’s the one I recommend. Your local bookstore can special order it for you in no time. The bookseller probably keeps their own well-thumbed copy in the back.)
With Your One Wild And Precious Life
Those two lines sit alone a lot of the time, but they are part of a larger poem. It’s a poem about the power and significance of paying attention to the world.
I’ve posted the full poem below for you so you can enjoy it while you wait for your book to arrive, but for now I want to show you just a few lines above these last two lines.
The speaker in the poem – whom we can easily imagine is Mary herself, though that isn’t always the case in poetry – has spent the day wandering around the fields near her house, paying attention to everything around her. In the course of her day, she encounters a grasshopper and slows down to truly pay attention to this small creature and how it’s living in the moment.
And then, we have the close of the poem:
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?
She means the grasshopper will die soon, but also… so will we, at last and too soon, our supply of weeks at an end. And it’s that line that gives the ubiquitous quote its powerful gut punch.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
This Isn’t A Poetry Lesson
Some people think that Mary’s poetry is too simple, not complex enough to warrant the attention it has received. They’re wrong, but I’m not here to argue that today.
This poem has always been the answer to the question – perhaps more cry of despair – that I often hear from writers who have been struggling to get to the page.
They say:
What’s the point?
And to that I say, quoting Mary:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Vocation And The Writer’s Call
The notion of “a calling” is a spiritual one, with a definition handed down from religion. (Billy Graham came up when I Googled it, but here is Tiny Buddha for you instead.)
But the dictionary definition is: a strong inner impulse toward a particular course of action. (Thank you Merriam-Webster.)
If you’ve felt that inner impulse inspiring you to pick up a pen and write, then I believe you have a vocation, or a calling, if you will, to write.
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?
Stop worrying about whether you’re any good at it or not, and get writing. You can’t be any good at it if you don’t actually sit down and write with some consistency.
Whatever stories or poems you want to write, time's ticking… how many weeks do you think you have left?
And however many weeks you think you may have, it’s not like a single one of them is guaranteed.
(Have I just cost you some sleep? Sorry ‘bout that!)
What’s The Point?
There are always a few writers in my First Book Finish program who have big dreams for their writing. And these writers are the most likely to feel the knife edge of despair about their work.
They say:
What’s the point?
What they mean is:
What’s the point, unless I can be GREAT. Unless my work astonishes critics, wins awards and 5-star reviews, sells millions of copies and goes down in history as part of the literary canon. If I can’t be GREAT, then what’s the point?
What they also mean is:
What’s the point, if the work isn’t GREAT out of the gate before the ink is even fully dry. If I have to work and revise because the writing doesn’t sing in its initial incarnation, then what is the point?
These writers know logically that writing is an iterative process, something that builds on itself with effort applied over time, but emotionally they want their work to be GREAT and they want it to be GREAT RIGHT NOW.
I know this all too well because I was that writer and on some days I still am.
And here’s where the rest of Mary’s poem saves me. A little further up, she writes...
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention…
And I think YES. Or, ⬆️ THIS ⬆️, as the Facebook Thor GIF goes.
I don’t know anything exactly, and I don’t know how to write anything sublime or GREAT, but I do know how to pay attention.
As a writer, that’s my only job: I pay attention to the world and I write down what I see.
That I can do, for the rest of the weeks I have remaining. So earlier this week, when I wrote what I thought was a truly atrocious draft of a poem (a ghazal) for a writing workshop I’m taking, I could just let that draft exist until I was able to come back to it and make it better.
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?
Thank you, Mary. You used your weeks so wisely and well.
And here for you is the full text of The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver.
Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle 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
If you’re struggling to write on a regular basis, the issue could be in how you think about your writing time. Get a free copy of my PDF Guide The Writer’s Weekly Planner and learn about the two kinds of writing time and how you can integrate both into your writing life this week to make it more productive and enjoyable.
