It’s a deeply existential question, and it’s one that most people ask ourselves somewhere along the way–likely many times.  Poet, Mary Oliver, has made her version of that question resound through time and space in the final stanzas of her poem, “The Summer 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?

One way or another, whether we realize it or not, we are all trying to answer that question: what am I doing with this one wild and precious life? Our answers will be as many as there are of us.  Some of our answers will overlap and parallel and intersect with the answers of other human beings. In some sense, the wonders of living are the various things we do, planned and unplanned, approved and unapproved, reasonable and unreasonable, the intended and the mistaken which help us discover why we are here, what we are doing with our lives. 

The work of all spiritual journeying is a process of opening ourselves to see and experience connection points that we had not noticed before and allow them a place in our hearts, our core. 

One of the reasons we don’t consciously deal with this question any more than we do may have to do with the unspoken question of mortality.  Everything, including us, does die, at last, and most of us would rather not take up that reality today. The more I journey in this life, though, the more real this becomes: regardless of my age or health status, when I give up working with this question, when I stop opening myself to see and experience life, I die. And, likewise, even if I am on my bed dying, and we all know that I have only hours left, if I am continuing to open to the experience of it all, including this thing called dying, I am as alive as a newborn baby–and likely quite as fragile. 

Today, then. To whom, for what, where, when and how shall I open myself, my heart and mind, my life? What meaning and truth await me there?

~Robert Patrick

If these kinds of questions and experiences sound familiar, you might find spiritual direction a good way to explore them.  Here’s how to get started.