WEEKLY MEDITATION
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
Life is, indeed, wild, precious, and fleeting. There is no way to avoid the temporariness of life, we are faced with it daily. The very best we can do is learn to accept life’s wild and everchanging nature, allowing it to urge us to live consciously and in a way that we have specifically chosen. Our addictions are an attempt to tame our lives, to make them comfortable and predictable. A life scripted by addiction is the opposite of one consciously chosen. While certainly we are always influenced and directed, at many levels, by forces and drives that we aren’t consciously aware of, we greatly further our ability to live freely if we rid ourselves of our most overwhelming and blatant addictions. Living a life steeped in addiction is a life of reaction, a life of automaticity. Successfully recovering from our addictions opens us up to the greatest possibility of living purposefully instead of being driven by simple avoidance. It allows us to explore life and find the place where we fit the best. It allows us to search out more options so we can find the people, circumstances, and rhythms that best honor the nature of who we were born to be. Life is unavoidably wild, and we must be free if we are to live up to its precious though fleeting potential.
