Hello,

The cold always reminds me of Mary Oliver. Recently, I’ve been thinking about this quote: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

It is a call to arms to breathe in the day, to invite evolution, to go off into that wild blue yonder—to live a life so full that you won’t look back one day and wonder where all the time has gone. I like to believe that this is what we all strive for, in one fashion or another.

During this past year, I have started to feel like an actual adult, like to some extent I understand how to navigate life even if I don’t do it particularly well. Perhaps that is how some of you feel as well. We’re two years out of undergrad now—the time for reflection upon what our life has become, what we have done with it thus far, what we will do with it yet.

But I often wonder what we are meant to do with an unwitnessed life.

I fear that I have changed quite a bit. In purely superficial ways, I don’t wear winged eyeliner anymore, which has been a staple of my face since I was fifteen, and I go to the movies now, even though I used to swear that it was the biggest waste of my time and money. I stopped reading Murakami, and I think I’ve become a worse writer.

Maybe these reflections aren’t permanent and are instead the product of an educational limbo and a post-break-up fugue, but I believe that I’ve done a lot of changing, and mostly I’ve done it alone. I fear that the further removed we are from college, the less I am able to understand my closest friends when all of our changing was done out of view.

Repeated, invested, and intimate interactions with people shape us, shape our understanding of ourselves. I read, once, in a book on the politics of recognition that love relationships are the crucibles through which we generate inward identity. Sometimes I’m not sure what I’m doing or what I’m feeling is real until I tell it to a friend. I fear that without this communal reflection in my life, I will become a less thinking person. And maybe this was all a more convoluted way of saying that I miss my friends, currently and preemptively, but I mean it. I do.

I want to know what you are doing with your one wild and precious life. Please tell me in excruciating detail.

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