Mary Oliver might be an internet-cliché already, but I find people tend to discard simple messages as clichés on the account of them being simple (and overused for very superficial purposes). As I see it, her simplicity is one of the rarest kind: the one that cuts right to the truth of things. This essay will not be about Mary Oliver. Hopefully it will be about the truth of things.
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, “The Summer Day”
You say, “I’m not where I wanted to be.” They say, “give yourself time”. They say, “to succeed will take time”. And you feel stuck, because in all of this, they helped you miss the point.
You can spend a thousand years giving yourself time, and nothing will ever happen. It’s a folly. A lame excuse, a play on yourself, to make you seem like you’re taking action, when you actually don’t.
It has never been about waiting. There is, literally, no time to wait: The force holding together the atoms that make your consciousness will, sooner or later, fail. Your time as the emergent being you are will, inevitably, end. Maybe not now, but, in the grand scale (think of the 4.5 billion years this planet has existed), very soon.
To fearfully scream into the void “But I’m not ready yet!” is, from that perspective, a blasphemy.
You’re not ready to live your life?
Tell me, what is it you’re choosing to do instead?
…
This is the point where most people start panicking, frantically searching for something to make their life matter.
Matter how?
Let’s face it, most of us don’t know how to answer that. All we know is that we want something, and it’s not there yet. Our lives don’t seem to make sense, and they never make sense in the way we wanted. They’re never how they are supposed to be. And so, we start optimizing, in search of some kind of a proof of life. An achievement. A legacy. A personal catalogue of “things done”. A receipt from existence.
In whatever we do, all the time, we insist on staying productive, inspirational, motivated, living-our-best-lives - even if it is, in the end, mostly just running around in circles and screaming a cautiously curated, full of hidden agendas “SEE-ME-HOW-I-LIVE!” on our social media accounts, for the sake of an instant confirmation of the lives-well-lived - and, of course, for posterity’s sake.
It doesn’t fill the void, but it’s a good distraction.
And we are free to continue dreaming that some day, everything will be different.
Yeah, it will. Some day, we’ll be dead.
But what about life?
At some point, scientists think, the fluid chemical reactions of an underwater volcano spontaneously just turned alive.1 Whizzzz, let there be Life. There wasn’t a reason for this. It just plopped into existence. It took evolution, we estimate, more than 3.7 billion years to arrive at the experimental stage of, among countless others, the human prototype: a work-in-progress, complex system of thinking and feeling matter, refined and multiplied from the principles Life tested already in the first microorganisms.
In short: You are a marvel of natural engineering.
That, in itself, matters: literally. Give or take, a 30-40 trillion cells that you’re made of do that mattering, all the time, to keep you alive, as long as they can.2
Even if “as long as they can” is, in this perspective, a very short-lived PLOP. They do it anyway. You are being done anyway. You’re the fruit of their labour: Natural, abundant productivity at its height.
And it’s been a marvelous success. You are still breathing, despite everything that could have gone wrong, right? Nothing, absolutely nothing you could do, will ever top that achievement.
So what more do you need?
Let’s go one step further: Do you know what is the chance of you, this specific, individual homo sapiens specimen, being born on this Earth?
…
Roughly one in a billion trillion trillion.3
But you exist, against all the logic and stupendous odds.
And you will never, ever happen again.
I don’t think anyone counted, but I assume, the odds are similarly ridiculous for that bird that stopped at your window yesterday, for a short moment. That tree you pass on your way to work. That ant that climbed on your foot to get a better look… They’re all your evolutionary kin - one that has simply chosen a different path. On rare occasions, your paths intertwine, and you can communicate, telling each other of the strange occurrences of your respective journeys - with a gaze, a gentle touch, a calling… In that instant, you become companions again.4
And then, there are all those chains of events involving you and everything else:
That seemingly ordinary stone you found on the forest path and still carry in your pocket. That stone might very well be around 400 million years old. You will turn to dust before it does. Your footsteps in the fresh, virgin snow you hadn’t expected this winter. What made the weather fronts and you align, both in time and space, in the grand scheme of all the air and water moving around this Earth? That hot cup of coffee. Made from grains that grew on the other side of the world and were roasted by your favourite Persian coffee enthusiast in your German city, which you arrived at as a stranger yourself, 12 years ago. The histories you both carry in you stare at each other from behind your respective backs. You grind them together in that old grinder you bought second-hand from the proud collection of someone’s grandma who has died.
That car accident that made the world spin in slow-motion, and left echoes of it in your bones forever. And the downright best meal of your life afterwards - a meal that tasted like brimming joy of being alive, in stark contrast to almost being dead now.
The boundless love you feel for that one other person you chanced upon among the 8 billions of other human beings - a convergence of paths which wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t randomly decided to do that thing when you were 13 years old.
And all the things that sprouted in your life as a consequence.
Reality is alight with random sparks that sing the history of everything with every atom of their fleeting being.
And then, they die.
In the end, entropy comes for us all.
Notice, notice, don’t forget to notice.
See the impossible wonder of your life and marvel at it.
As long as it is here.
Your life is a spark in the void. Your life exists in time. More precisely, it exists Now. And each moment of that Now happens only once. It’s your choice what you’ll do with it. What will you do with your one wild and precious life?
As I see it, on this cold January day, I have no time to give to myself. That would be a waste. I have no time to feed the monster of my self-important self - it’s already too fat and bitter, which makes it hard to move around.
I want to be light again.
I want to give the animal in me space to do what it’s supposed to do: bubble with joy in every breath it takes.
Because the number of breaths it can take is limited. From the biochemistry point of view, we are literally slowly cooking inside,5 all the time, and when we’re well done, we’re done with living.
From that point of view, the only thing you can do, is to see the world - hungrily, mindfully, tenderly. And to let it touch you with its spice - before you burn down to chaos.
I want to give time to my life now. And this means, being conscious about the ways time feeds on me. Because, in the end, it’s that way around. Being a complex organism has its cost, and the cost is that we’re continuously falling apart. The body has an expiration date. Time consumes us.
So I don’t have time to give myself time. It’s not in my power. And I don’t have an excuse to not give time my attention, as it flows through me. My life is my life, and it is happening right now.
The trick is not to panic.
Because despite the lack of time, it’s not about speeding up. The opposite. Attention is a slow creature. It needs lots of nurture and patience.
The trick is to choose what to feed time first.
So if something screams in me: “this is boring, we don’t have time for this, we have so much to do” - I throw it into the open, always open, jaws of time. Deep breath. Feel your heartbeat. Treasure your eyes, your ears, your nose - for they are still here.
Sit with your life. Sit in it. Taste it on your tongue. And listen.
Throw away any urge for hastiness.
Let the time tear apart the expectations and requests towards your life before it gnaws at your body any further. And then, cherish your sensual presence in this world.
Cherish the world that offers itself up to you, for your time being, for your time being alive.
Ordinary meetings. Uneventful events.
Underneath the socially acceptable definition of what matters, there’s a whole universe of creatures and sensations unseen, unnamed and untamed, wildly chanting the rhythms of Life. All the cells of your fragile body are filled with a yearning for that. Because what Life is, above all, is magic. And that includes your ordinary, uneventful life.
So get curious about WHAT IT HERE, NOW.
Experience your experience, as it offers itself up to you.
Suddenly, the panic dissipates. Time slows down on its own.6
And then, Life opens.
And everything is right, just as it is.
Henry David Thoreau makes an argument for going into the woods in order to live more deliberately. But the truth is, yearning for some distant woods that will change your life is a sham. The woods are right here, always. As cliché as it sounds: it’s not about changing your life, it’s about living it - with an awe of a child that sees everything for the first time.
The only thing you need to do is pay attention. Your situation, now, is the best kind of training ground.
And remember.
“Beautiful things don’t ask for attention…” 7
Wait, this was supposed to be about arts…
Well, isn’t it?
This essay is a part of a series on art, which you can explore here.
Something Brian Cox talks about in the amazing BBC series “Forces of Nature”.
Some examples to visually chew on…
At least that’s the number Neil deGrasse Tyson gives.
When I was a child, walking back from school, whenever a bus drove past, I used to imagine the perspectives of the people on the bus - who are they, what are they seeing as they pass by me, where are they going, and what are they thinking about. It’s kinda like that…
Think glycation.
This is actually scientifically proven: When in state of awe, we experience time differently. (Dacher Keltner, “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life”, 2023).
A sentence that’s been echoing in my head since I’ve heard it in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (2013) years ago.