Is There a Perfect Moment?

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

May 21, 2025

Mary Oliver’s timeless question echoes within me often: Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

For many of us, the answer drifts toward peace—toward purpose, joy, love, and the intimacy of true connection. And while these may seem like our highest aspirations, more often than not, it’s through the murk and the mess that we come closer to them. I like to think of it as a dance between the light and the shadow, the underworld and the sacred bliss, yin and yang. One cannot truly be known without the contrast of the other.

It’s as if we must taste the deepest sorrow to fully savour the highest joy.

I’ve often wrestled with the phrase, When you laugh, the whole world laughs with you; when you cry, you cry alone. There’s a sting in that sentiment—it feels shaming. It implies that our pain must be private, that when we are hurting, we become isolated, left to shoulder it in silence. This idea carries a subtle abandonment of ourselves and of each other.

And yet, I also know the truth in the opposite. When we laugh together, when we celebrate someone’s joy, it’s as if we get to borrow a little shimmer of their light. We feel threaded into their radiant moment, the coat tails of their celebration. We all ride the wave for a brief time, stepping us out of the mundane to somewhere higher. This is the sacred essence of connection, something I deeply cherish and one that gently leads me back to the heart of what it means to be human.

We may all feel alone, separate, and unseen at times. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, we find ourselves weaving and binding ourselves to one another in the most intricate, invisible ways, in a grand interplay. We each, through the wondrous action of living in a human body, become part of a living tapestry, a stitch here and a stitch there, delicately and unmistakably woven into each other’s lives.

I don’t belong solely to joy, nor sorrow—I hold both, tenderly and reverently. This is the exquisite allness of being human.

I’ve heard it said that exhilaration and fear are close neighbours, resting side by side in the somatic landscape of the body. I believe we are always weaving between the two. Perhaps it is more nourishing to allow than to control, more sacred to witness than to fix.

The luminous and the shadowed. The celebration and the ache. The human journey isn’t about choosing one over the other—it’s about honouring the wholeness, the full spectrum of our lives, each moment a shifting facet in the kaleidoscope of our being.

Our moments of bliss and sorrow are mirrors— each reflecting back the richness of the journey in this one wild, precious life.