There's a quote that every time I read it or hear it, it just causes me to take a deep breath. It's the one from Mary Oliver, "Tell me, what will you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" What a phrase: one wild and precious life. There's something about that phrase that strikes very deeply, and causes me to pause and really think differently about any number of things.

Partly, it's kind of like that phrase: it's a shame to waste a mind. I can't remember the phrase exactly, but it really is a shame to waste a life. That's what what Mary is referring to with that phrase. But the really cool part is the idea that you have this incredible possibility, a wild and precious life, something you might be able to do with it. In recent years, I find myself talking a lot with people about the Soul's Journey Home, which is not to die. What it means is that we came here with a purpose.

Now, whether that's a higher self, or whether that's a soul, I don't suppose it matters. But what seems to be true is that we came here with some thing to fulfill or be called to. And most of us apparently have an ability to get distracted ,and goodness knows there's so many things to pay attention to.

But if it's true, that we are in fact called to something, to a Soul’s Journey Home, some magnificent, amazing, cool thing we are supposed to do with this life we've been gifted with, then suddenly, we begin to ask ourselves a different set of questions, What am I going to do with the day? What am I going to do to fulfill that purpose? Where am I going? I mean, I was just talking to someone yesterday about this. They said, “I'm really having an existential crisis, what is the point of this life I'm living?” I said, “That is an outstanding question.”

I know that we get caught up in the affairs of the day and it's so easy to do that. And I realize it's easy to balk at asking these big, expansive questions about ourselves and our lives. But if Mary Oliver is right, that it's your one, wild and precious life, I think you probably owe it to yourself. We all owe it to ourselves. To take a deep breath, ask that big question and see where it takes us. Might surprise you, might surprise all of us, might just change the world.