How Do You Choose to Spend Your One Wild, Precious & Meaningful Life?

“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?“

Mary Oliver

It’s so easy to get caught in the hustle and bustle of life and feel like you’re just going through the motions. Everyday can start to feel like groundhog day, and you might find yourself living for the weekends or vacations. If that works for you, that’s great, and you probably won’t be interested in this post. If you’re tired of living life on autopilot, or if you’re just plain tired of being tired all. the. time., and you’re hoping there might be more to this life, then you’re in the right place. There is more to this life, and you’ve got the power to choose how you spend your wild, precious, and meaningful life.

This blog is all about helping you live more intentionally and build a life that feels meaningful to you. I’m here to support you with the how– how to build a meaningful life- that’s my focus. I share lots of researched-based ideas for how to care for yourself inside and out to take the guess work out of how to operate at your highest level. And your job is to figure our your what– what you do with your time, your heart, your visions, your dreams- as you craft your meaningful life.

The Process of Building a Meaningful Life

I like to think of the process of building a meaningful life in metaphor. Imagine we’re on a road trip together. You’re in the driver’s seat; I’m in the passenger’s seat. We’ve already agreed on the destination, which is a meaningful life in this case. As the driver, you’re going to decide when we leave, how fast or slow we go, if we make any pit stops along the way, and what route to take. I’m in the passenger’s seat holding a map and have general sense of the path towards the destination.

More specifically but still generally speaking, the process of building a meaningful life is the process of figuring out what helps you function at your best, feel your best, and pursue what lights you up. It sounds relatively simple, right? Most things can sound pretty simple or complex, depending on how we frame them. For the most part, organic processes like this are simple in concept, but complex and multifaceted in experience. Figuring out what helps you function at your best is a simple concept, and it demands your time, attention, tracking, and patience. None of those commodities are free, and it’s especially challenging to dedicate to a slow process like this in our fast-paced, instant gratification-driven modern times. Building a meaningful life is a slow game that takes regular daily consideration. It’s like a fire we that we want to keep lit so we have to tend to it every so often. Another example is brushing your teeth everyday- it’s a long term investment in your health that takes a little bit of monitoring and maintenance everyday.

Because the human experience is subjective, it’s challenging to define what makes life meaningful. It’s also something that you need to determine on your own. What makes life meaningful to me and other people might not feel meaningful to you, and that’s okay. But should our definitions of meaningful living happen to sync up, then buckle up and let’s hit the road together- metaphorically speaking, of course.

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.”

-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

What Makes a Meaningful Life

As a person who likes to explore the forest and the trees, let’s zoom out and consider some elements that may help structure a framework for your personal exploration of what makes a meaningful life. The research frequently cites meaningful living as a reflective part of aging. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have to wait until my golden years to think back on life and determine if it was meaningful or not, especially when I have the power to build a meaningful life in real time over the course of my life and enjoy every moment of it in the present.

What the Research Says

The Pew Research Center found that, according to the data collected from 19,000 adults in 2021, the highest ranked elements of meaningful living are family, work/occupation, health, friends/community, and “material well-being.” This blog aligns with elements of that research, focusing on relationships (family and friends/community), mental and physical health, and your environment, which could be classified as material well-being in some regards. All of those pieces encompass the how of cultivating a meaningful life. The work/occupation piece is left up to you- that’s what I refer to as the what for how you choose to spend your time.

Other research looks at creating a meaningful existence from an intrapersonal perspective. By intrapersonal, I mean an individual’s internal and individual experience. This research cites meaningful living as having these essential internal components:

• Making sense of your life story
• Believing that your life matters
• Reaching long-term goals
• Appreciate and gratitude

Looking Backwards: Making Sense of Your Story and Reaching Long-term Goals

Some of these intrapersonal elements have a reflective nature to them that can best be determined when looking back on an event, like making sense of your life story. It can be so challenging to see and understand how the dots connect in the present moment, but when we look back on events and happenings, it can be so easy to see how we got to where we are now. Some of this work is most easily done in the later years of life, but surely there are points along the way where we can pause and reflect on how we’ve grown over a few months or years at any age. There’s an aspect of reaching long-term goals that lends itself to old age as well, but that doesn’t mean that long-term goals can’t be a focus of the present moment, too.

Tools for Now and the Future: Gratitude & Believing Your Life Matters

Thankfully (no pun intended), gratitude is always accessible to us regardless of age, and there’s a notable body of research documenting the impact of gratitude. People who practice gratitude regularly are happier and feel more hopeful and optimistic. Gratitude can also reduce the amount of time we spend comparing ourselves to others, which leaves us wanting what we have more than what we don’t have. Research shows that gratitude promotes the “feel good” neurotransmitters in the brain, which are dopamine and serotonin. Those chemicals are released in connection to the emotions rooted in happiness and feel pleasurable. Practicing gratitude can rewire your brain to feel pleasure and default to positive thinking, reducing anxiety and depression by regulating stress hormones.

Research also shows that practicing gratitude stimulates the medial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex in the brain. The medial prefrontal cortex plays a role in cognition and memory, emotional regulation, and behavioral responses to social situations. It helps us to self reflect and developing an understanding of ourselves and others. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is unique in that it connects to the emotional part of the brain (limbic system), and the cognitive part of the brain (prefrontal cortex). The ACC is involved in decision-making, impulse control, morality and ethical considerations, attention, empathy, expressing and regulating emotions, response to pain, and regulation of the autonomic nervous system. What does all this mean? It means that you can strengthen these parts of your brain and alter your baseline state of being because we know that neuroplasticity allows the brain to change based on our experiences. What fires together wires together in the brain, so the more you do something, the more your brain will develop to support you in doing it.

Believing that your life matters is another practice that is always accessible to us regardless of age. As we often find, it’s a simple concept, but it can be challenging to shift. Our beliefs are wired into us through procedural and relational learning, meaning that our earliest experiences with caregivers and ongoing experiences throughout our lives wire our believes about ourselves, others, and how the world works into our brains. It’s not something we learn directly, like math, which makes it challenging to identify, examine, and shift. The framework you have for how you feel about yourself and understand yourself comes primarily from how your caregivers felt about you and how they interacted with you before you had language and a concept of time, before your autobiographical memory started recording your life story (this normally kicks in around age five). Up until age three, the brain is entirely relational- it understands the world primarily through the lens of relationship with others. Believing that your life matters develops from feeling emotionally safe in your relationships. If you’re realizing that you struggle with believing your life matters, fear not because we know that the brain is neuroplastic; it changes based on our experiences. If you want to tackle your believes about yourself and your life mattering (because your life absolutely does matter), you can go to therapy and get the support you need to shift your believe system over time. It’s doable, it’s realistic, and you deserve to know your inherent value and worth just by being who you are.

Emotional Safety is the Key to Cultivating Meaningful Relationships

How to Build a Meaningful Life

Okay, time for the step-by-step how-to guide! Basically, here are the steps:

1. Know yourself: Who are you? What do you want for your life? What matters to you?
2. Take good care of yourself: What helps you feel your best?
3. Build and deepen your relationships: Spend time with the people that fill your cup.
4. Live intentionally: Do the things that are best aligned with knowing and caring for yourself and connecting with others as much as you can.

That’s it! Easy, right? Okay, so maybe not so easy, but totally possible and certainly worth it. I break this process down even further in this post if you’re ready to dive in. If you’re on the fence, I get it, and it’s your call when, if ever, you make the investment in living a meaningful life. Listen, time is going to pass- your life is going to pass- regardless if you do or don’t focus on building a meaningful life. You might get lucky and be able to look back at the end of life and be satisfied with how things turned out. You might not. We can’t control luck, but you do have the power to shape your life, day in and day out, in a bunch of small, seemingly insignificant ways that can add up to a whole bunch of meaningfulness one day.

How to Live a Meaningful Life

A Happy Life vs. a Meaningful Life

This is a really important point to make: a meaningful life does not equal a happy life. My husband and I spent years disagreeing on this early in our relationship. I think it’s especially important to explore because we’ve somehow diluted our emotional experiences in modern society to focus on only being happy (and wealthy) as the goal in life. That feels two-dimensional, flat, and void to me. And of course, if you’ve ever watched Disney’s Inside Out, you know that happiness cannot exist without sadness. A meaningful life gives us space to feel all the emotions as part of the complex human experience without prioritizing or focusing on any one feeling in particular. Sure, we all want to feel pleasure, and in order to do that, we have to be willing to accept that we will feel pain sometimes, too. Without the pain, we’re stifled- our relationships can’t be too deep, our passion is limited, and our life lacks the depth that our soul holds the capacity for.

The research backs up the limitations of focusing on happiness, showing five key elements that differentiate a meaningful life from a happy life:

1. Meaningful living takes stock of the past, present, and future, as well as how they’re connected, whereas happiness is focused on the present moment only.
2. Meaningful living often involves times of stress and challenge.
3. Meaningful living requires a component of self-expression, but happiness does not.
4. Living a meaningful life comes from connecting with others and giving to others, and happiness is associated with taking from others.
5. Meaningful living does not require satisfying a person’s needs and wants: ease, wealth, and health are not necessary for meaning-making. I think it’s ideal to have one’s needs met in order to be able to focus on meaningful living- that’s how this blog is designed- and we cannot discount the capacity of some people to find meaning in terrible circumstances, like Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. His observation was that meaning-making in life enhances survival, noting that people who were future oriented during the Holocaust were most likely to survive.

Mary Oliver’s Introspective Prompt

Perhaps you’ve read Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day, before, which is where I pulled the quote from at the top of this post. It is one of my favorite quotes because it offers so much perspective. At any given moment, we can ask ourselves two important questions: “What’s my focus? What’s my priority?” There is magic all around us in the smallest of things that we take for granted, especially in nature. There is inherent genius in nature. When we’re so task focused, we miss all of the little things around us: the clouds in sky, the pastels of a sunset, the peace in a sunrise, birdsong, the intricate patterns on plants and insects and animals.

Sometimes, our priority will be a task at hand; sometimes it will be engaging in a particular relationship. I often offer this question to parent clients in parenting support therapy: “Is your priority the task at hand, or your relationship with your child right now?” What are the ramifications of each? if you focus on the task and get them in the car right now with force, what does that mean for your relationship tomorrow when it’s time to get them in the car, or next month, or next year? And if you prioritize the relationship, where does that get you?

The same framework applies to you living a meaningful life. When you want to sit down and watch tv, what’s your priority? Where does it lead you? Are you watching tv intentionally, choosing to spend your time this way for connection with someone else, education about something, or time to turn off your brain? Or are you watching tv to escape something or avoid something? If you’re using it to avoid and escape, then you’re missing out on your one wild, precious, and meaningful life. You’ve momentarily forgotten its value. And you will from time to time, and that’s okay. That makes you human.

Mary Oliver’s message is clear: life is short. Find meaning in your journey toward meaningful living. It will never be perfect and it doesn’t need to be. The goal isn’t perfection or even progress. The goal is fulfillment, and connection, and for you to know in your heart you’re living the life that fills your cup, because when our cup is full, we can share with others.

It takes time for life to feel meaningful, but every little shift counts and moves your closer. So, onward, dear soul, in search of your meaningful life, filling your cup day by day, moment by moment. Go care for your one wild, precious, and meaningful life.

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