In her poem, “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver asks, as everyone who’s ever been in the greeting card section of Wal-Mart knows, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
As I sit here on Midsummer’s Eve (which oddly enough, occurs in spring—remember that for your trivia contests), I’m perfectly happy to answer: enjoying a Swiss cheese on rye sandwich while watching a World Cup soccer game between two teams I don’t really care about.
Granted, that’s not ALL I will do with it, but for now, it’s sufficient. Of course, before the season is out, I hope to realize my essential nature as identical with the fundamental ground of all being and with any luck, make a major contribution to solving the homelessness crisis, but in the meantime, mustard, mayonnaise, relish, tomato, lettuce, and Swiss does the trick.
You only live once—thank goodness—so you might think that one’s plans for this wild and precious instantiation ought to be about maximizing experience and accomplishment at every moment and there’s much to be said for that, of course, especially if you’re in the business of selling vitamin supplements or even college course, but there’s also plenty to spoken about in favor of a life that isn’t treated as nearly so precious.
Consider one, by contrast, that’s just kind of everyday, one that’s more like the flatware and less like the silverware, one that you don’t have to worry so much about breaking, one that stands up to day-to-day use and can still do its job even if cracked and dented a bit.
What this looks like in practice is open to interpretation, but perhaps it opens the proverbial door to such possibilities as afternoon naps, beach book reads, the occasional bout of day-drinking, and maybe even watching sporting events that one doesn’t care particularly much about in the basement on a sunny day just before summer begins.
