One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
— Mary Oliver, The Journey

We become what we focus on and apply ourselves to. People and pets in our lives demand and deserve the best of us in the moment. There is a stack of unread books demanding attention just to my right, and work equally insistent on my attention just to my left. Directly in between is the Mac I write on. What we do with our time determines so much of who we become. Yet there’s only so much time. Even as I write this I can hear the last of the oak leaves (there never is a true end to oak leaves) falling onto the lawn. The time it takes to clean up those leaves is an investment in nominal physical fitness, but also a mental cleansing. It turns out I need the leaves to pay penance for this plot of land I center my life around. It’s a bullseye of my identity in an indifferent universe.

The scale whispers something else entirely: What have you done? What are you going to do about it now to fix this? It turns out that clearing leaves isn’t quite enough to balance out the chocolate and wine and that extra serving of stuffing. We are all slaves to our habits, and become what our master demands. We must break free of the worst habits while there’s still a chance to escape the default of less for the potential of more.

Lately the world seems to occupy ever more and more space of mind. Do you feel its pull? To do anything in our time, we must eventually shake off the noise of our world and move to our own calling. We ought to have the audacity to believe we have a place in whatever the world will be. Something will come of all this, for simply by going to it we are transformed. Now and then, that transformation reaches the attention of others. A ripple begins with a splash. And a splash begins with a leap into the unknown.

Becoming requires motion: a vivid expression of what we believe might be, realized. We must move away from what we once were to what we envision our future self to be. What have you done? What are you going to do about it now to fix this? Filling the gap between the two end points is our lifetime mission. The more we make of our lives the bigger the subsequent splash and ripple.