What Will You Do with Your Life?

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

 Mary Oliver asked that at the end of a poem about watching a grasshopper eat sugar out of her hand. It is a strange and disarming question to bring to work on a Monday morning. But it may be the most important one we can ask right now.

Consider the world as many of us experience it today. There’s an onslaught of bad news, terrifying events, catastrophe, conflict. The data flies at us moment to moment with an intensity that has never been experienced before. Notifications, headlines, crises, the next thing and the next thing. Our nervous systems were not built for this volume, and it shows in our focus, our judgment, our relationships, our sense of who we are.

So what do we do in the middle of it all?

The counterintuitive answer is to stop and reflect on the wonder of being alive. Not as an indulgence, and not as an escape, but as a discipline. The more time we spend in that headspace of noticing, of actually inhabiting the spectacular life we have, the more it diminishes the power of all that negativity. And, not incidentally, it makes us better at our work and better at making choices.

You already know the four people I am about to mention. That is the point, actually, because by reminding you of them I want to bring them back into your consciousness. It doesn’t take much to recall why these writers have stayed with so many of us. Each one, in their own way, is an example of what it looks like to pause and notice the distinctly human aspects of being alive. And simply by calling them to mind, you can borrow that attention for yourself.

Viktor Frankl: the freedom that cannot be taken

You know his story. The Viennese psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps lost almost everyone he loved. He emerged insisting that between what happens to us and how we respond there is a space, and in that space lies our freedom. What is worth recalling is how hard-won and unsentimental that idea was. He drew a sharp line between it and mere positive thinking. It is not pretending hardship is fine. It is acknowledging suffering fully and still finding meaning inside it.

Frankl tells of a prisoner who found hope in a flowering branch beyond the concentration camp fence. That simple moment of attention illustrates the power of inner space—the human capacity to discover meaning, beauty, and possibility even in the harshest circumstances.

This space is where freedom and healing are found. It exists even, or especially, within the onslaught of images, noise, and distractions that fill our daily lives. It is where true meaning can be discovered and rediscovered.

Do we see the flowering branch just beyond the horrible thing, where hope for growth and freedom is also fully evident? Or does our thought return again and again to the sensation of the horrible thing?

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” —Viktor Frankl

Oliver Sacks: the uniqueness of a single life

More than diagnosing neurological conditions, Oliver Sacks sought to understand how each person perceives and makes sense of the world around them. His work reminds us that every individual experiences life differently, and that understanding begins with curiosity.

Near the end of his life, facing a terminal diagnosis, he wrote that it is the fate of every human being to be a unique individual, to find their own path, to live their own life, and to die their own death. When we fully accept that never before, nor ever again, will there be anyone exactly like us, we begin to appreciate with deep humility the infinite beauty and variety of each of our fellow human beings as well.

“Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” —Oliver Sacks

Rachel Carson: the wonder we are told to outgrow

The marine biologist whose writing essentially launched the modern environmental movement had a rare gift. She embodied a scientific rigor expressed in achingly beautiful prose.

She insisted we are not separate from the living world but organically woven into it, and that what we do ripples outward in ways we cannot fully see. She wrote about wonder itself, and argued that the capacity for awe is not a childish thing to be outgrown, but a sensibility to protect and practice across a whole lifetime.

For those of us who spend our days in spreadsheets and meetings, that is a bracing correction. The gift of this earth’s natural beauty is easily overlooked if we do not stop to see it, listen to it, sense it, revel in its fragility, and honor it.

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” —Rachel Carson

Margaret Mead: what we pass on

The anthropologist who spent her life studying how cultures form and pass themselves from one generation to the next left us with an acute realization. Culture is not an environment that simply happens to us. It is a choice, made and remade through what we teach and what we exemplify through our behavior.

In an organization this becomes bracingly concrete. What are you teaching by how you behave under pressure? What are you exemplifying when the bad news hits? Your people are learning from you whether or not you mean to teach. The tone you set in the middle of the onslaught becomes the tone they carry into their own teams.

Most of all Margaret Mead shared her awe and appreciation for the great diversity of human societies on our planet, which inspired these potent words:

“It is utterly false and cruel to regard all people who have different customs from ourselves as naturally inferior.” —Margaret Mead

What they have in common

Put these four together and a practical picture emerges. From Viktor Frankl, we learn that meaning is a choice. From Oliver Sacks, we understand that attention is a choice. From Rachel Carson, we experience wonder as a choice that we are too often wrongly told to abandon. From Margaret Mead, we see that culture is the choice we make through our behavior.

The world will keep flying at us, and that is not going to change. What can change is what we choose to focus upon. What shifts within us makes a difference—not only for ourselves, but for those around us.

What puts it all together

I am not asking you to change anything on your calendar today. Keep the meetings, keep the deadlines, keep the list. Can you take just five minutes this morning? If you have the luxury, ten would be even better. Fifteen or twenty, better still. But in whatever minutes you have, before the week takes hold, stop.

Sit wherever feels right for you. Maybe it is a chair by a window. Maybe it is on a bench in a park, or in the car before you go into the office. Wherever you can be still for a moment is fine. And for those precious minutes, ask yourself the simplest version of Mary Oliver’s question: what is wonderful and spectacular about my life, as I sit here right now?

It isn’t the achievements or the metrics. It is the ordinary wonder of it all. You are here, alive on this beautiful planet. You are taking a deep breath in the delicious quiet of this moment.

Do you remember the miracle of being your one and only unique self? You do not have to solve anything. Just notice your breath. Do nothing. Simply allow.

Let this question carry you through this life, one day at a time.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Sources

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) — the book widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) — his account of survival in the camps and the foundation of logotherapy.

Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (William Morrow, 1928) — the study that established her as the most famous anthropologist of her era.

Oliver Sacks, Gratitude (Knopf, 2015) — four essays written in his final months, an ode to the uniqueness of each human life.

Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” from New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1992) — the source of the closing question.