A Year End Reflection
This is the season for reflection. As the new year approaches, I treasure these moments of quiet pondering after the chaotic celebrations of the last month. Lately, I have been reading a collection of Mary Oliver poems in the morning while I enjoy my breakfast. For several mornings, I have been meditating upon her poem “The Summer Day,” perhaps an odd choice for this time of year but meaningful all the same.
The poem ends with these familiar lines:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Often taken out of context, I have seen this quote used as a motivation for exhausted people to keep working hard in order to leave some kind of egocentric legacy. Check things off your bucket list! Do grand things and be grand!
In fact, Mary’s poem is primarily her observation of a grasshopper. Not of every grasshopper, but of a very specific one who is eating sugar out of her hand. Eventually the grasshopper flies away, and she writes,
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?
Rather than a call to action, Mary’s poem is a call to slow down, to pay attention to life as it unfolds before our very eyes. Many people use this time of year to set resolutions, but that has never worked for me. Resolutions tend to be focused on a future ideal self that is not based in the reality of our day to day lives. That isn’t to say I have no room for improvement in my life, but it is saying that resolutions typically don’t lead to a deeper understanding of myself or a deeper connection to the world around me, both essential components of true improvement. For that, I need to be attuned to my present reality before it passes by without my noticing. There is no need to worry about a tomorrow that isn’t promised to me.
This doesn’t stop me from worrying. I would just rather use my limited time and energy to attend to this, rather than strive for that. This is enough work for a lifetime.
No one has life figured out. Not me, not Mary Oliver, not you. No one has it all figured out because no one else is living your life, and even you will never know whether you will be gifted with another tomorrow. Yet we can learn from each other, help each other, uplift each other. We can open our closed and anxious fists and share from this day’s abundance. We can reflect with gratitude on all we have been given and all we give, as we make meaning of our one wild and precious life.
