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

The other day, my friend Amy posted this poem on Facebook:

The Summer Day
--Mary Oliver

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?

**

I love Mary Oliver, and I find myself flipping through her New and Selected Poems at least every couple of months, but I haven't read this one in a very long time. All the same, it's one of my favorites, and these were the first lines I copied on the first page of a thick notebook with a green suede cover and cream-colored pages, late in August of 2001. I was days away from beginning my first year as a high school English teacher in an unfamiliar town, living by myself in my first apartment, taking care of my new little dog and trying to figure out how to navigate this brand-new territory.

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

When I read this the other day, I went hunting for that journal -- another thing I haven't read in a long, long time. Years. But I remember exactly where I was when I cracked it open for the first time; I was sitting at a corner table at Starbucks, next to the window. It was a sunny, slightly breezy Sunday afternoon and I was drinking a caramel macchiato, trying very hard not to panic and feeling, strangely enough, that I might just be okay. I'd started planning actual lessons that I would teach to actual teenagers. I'd seen all of the classrooms in which I'd spend my days; I didn't have enough seniority for my own classroom, of course, so I went back and forth between a dusty room so crowded with stuff I didn't have room to store an extra pen and a dark, hot room that smelled of mold and was cluttered with the random belongings of a teacher who'd long since retired. Neither of the teachers I shared with seemed to mind the clutter, the dust, or the dankness, and since it was primarily their space, I had to do the best I could to cope. I didn't have enough desks or enough books for my students, but I didn't know that yet. I was such a roiling mix of emotions then: all this shining optimism churning with sheer terror. I was going to save the world through literature. I also had to figure out how to get to the post office and the grocery store.

It's kind of a fabulous thing, being twenty-two years old and out in the world, doing exactly what you believe you were born to do -- or trying to, anyway. I still wouldn't ever go back and do that first year again, though.

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.

Sometimes I wonder what my twenty-two year-old self would say to my thirty year-old self if she could see me today on this sunny February afternoon, typing away while my children nap, jotting a grocery list, tossing a load of clothes in the dryer. At twenty-two, I imagined my entire future stretching out in front of me, and I thought I knew exactly where it would go. I'd teach English, I'd marry Matt, we'd buy a little house somewhere, I'd get my Master's degree, we'd have a couple of kids. And of course, it's not like that's the end. But at twenty-two, there's a pretty huge buffer between the present moment and this somewhat distant grown-up life in which all of those things have been, for lack of a better word, achieved. And as scary as the present was for me as I stood in front of a class of forty-two sophomores for the first time, there was some comfort in that.

People ask, "So how do you like teaching?" (And when they find out it's high school, their eyes are often wide, incredulous, skeptical.) And I always say, "I love it." And I mean it. I've always meant it. I could talk about how I think it's important work or about how it feels to sit with a smart group of kids and talk about the things that connect us. Because when it comes right down to it, that's why I teach English -- because I believe in the importance of language and stories and connections, and I believe we ultimately read literature to be reminded of our humanity. This is the kind of answer I'd give at twenty-two, and nine years later I think I'd still say more or less the same thing. I'd like to believe that nine years later I'm still just as passionate. But I also believe that my life has the potential to go in directions I couldn't really have envisioned at twenty-two.

Would I have imagined days like this? The kind where I spend my morning with a baby on my hip, drinking coffee out of a ceramic mug in my study instead of a travel mug or to-go cup on my desk? The kind where a preschooler entreats me to sit next to her while we eat "breffast" and I nurse her baby brother before we do one of her puzzles or glue beans on popsicle sticks for no other reason than because she likes the way it looks, likes the feel of digging her fingers in the bag of dried beans? The kind where we take a walk every day, sometimes to the park, sometimes to Starbucks, and sometimes just to pick up pinecones and sticks and watch the squirrels scrabbling up and down the tree trunks?

Where does the future lead? Can I see it from here, the same way I could see it from my first classroom or the balcony of my first apartment?

I do know how to pay attention

Writers have to notice things. Mothers have to notice things. The world is new every single day, even when our days seem, on the surface, very much the same, and to not notice the grand and the subtle ways it opens itself up to us is a huge loss. I guess that's really just a fancy way of saying I'm trying to live in the moment in a way I don't think my younger self was really able to.

I think it would be easiest to choose a particular path and stick to it. It seems like that's what we're supposed to do, anyway, almost from the very beginning: What do you want to be when you grow up?

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

But what I'm realizing now is that I could be happy with so many possibilities, so many maybes. Life can look like a lot of things I couldn't see when I was fifteen, or twenty-two. Maybe things I can't even see now, at thirty. Of course, I still feel like I should have things more or less figured out at thirty, but then a tiny part of me wonders if maybe I wasn't a little closer at the age of five, when I wanted to be a dozen things, sometimes all at once. When I was happiest in the moment anyway.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Maybe this is one of the gifts of having children, because I see all that shining possibility in my daughter's eyes, because we're happy just being in the world on a sunny afternoon, because while there are all of these things I have to worry about -- because I am an adult -- maybe they don't have to matter as much as I think they do, and maybe I can figure out a way to trust that everything will work out the way it's supposed to. And my life five or ten years from now might not look anything like I thought it would when I graduated from college and moved into that first little apartment overlooking Puget Sound, but maybe that's okay, and maybe, in this moment, I can let go of my plans enough to embrace some of the maybe. I don't know what that looks like yet, but I don't want to worry about it so much that I miss seeing what's right in front of me today.