Set free by wild geese

I used to be in prison.

A prison of unease that I was not living up to my full potential. Self-judgement that was with me all the time. It truly felt like a prison.

For so long I raced around trying this-and-that, and by ‘trying’, I mean giving something several years to prove itself. I’d submit whole-heartedly to whatever I was giving my time and effort to.

And then eventually I’d realise this thing was a closed loop, not capable of growing beyond itself, and so I’d drop that thing and take up another thing — a thing that rang of higher truth than what I had just left behind. Until I realised there was no particularly special higher truth within that next thing because it was just a different version of all the previous things.

Hoo-wee, was that exhausting. Constant emotional, mental and financial investment in philosophies, faiths, health practices, and medications that only left me hollow once I saw the simpler reality of ‘doesn’t really change anything’ behind each of them. All I was gaining was worldly experience without feeling I was ‘meeting my potential’.

And then one day I came across something that released me from my prison of striving for perfection.

That thing was the following poem.

Let me explain how this poem changed my life.

You do not have to be good.

I suspect that Mary Oliver is having a go at ‘good’ as religions and spiritual philosophies define it: in the case of women, always being kind, selfless, sacrificial, agreeable; in the case of men, always being strong, cool, industrious, protective. Every person is any of these things at the required time, and no one has to put on an act that only women are this and must be this all the time or that only men are this and must be this all the time.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

And when you fail to live up to those falsely proscribed traits for your gender, know that beating yourself up for that is unnecessary. Why? Because…

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

…the purpose of life is to just Be. It’s not to achieve, it’s not to be a ‘good woman’ or a ‘good man’, it’s simply to Be.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

This line still pops into my mind at the times when the vagaries of life are hitting me between the eyes and I want the world to know I am being victimised. This line reminds me that everyone is being victimised for a time at any time. Everyone loses parents to death, everyone has people come into and then out of their lives. Everyone feels stress and strain. These situations of despair are just life doing life.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Every now and then I look up at the moon and say to it: “Oh, the things you’ve been witness to. The things you’ve seen humans do to each other over the millennia. What must you think of us? And how many trillions upon trillions of people have looked up at you over those millennia – just like I am looking up at you now. Those trillions of people have all come and gone, as I will be gone one day, and still you’ll be there.”

And then sometimes I’ll watch a flock of starlings do their choreography in the sky, or whales swim under the boat I am on in the open Southern Ocean each year, and think to myself, “You’re not the slightest bit interested in human problems, and you’re just Being. You understand the circle of life better than humans do.”

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

It’s just life. We are born, we live, we die. Put aside the self-competitiveness, put aside the need to maximise what other people tell you is your potential. Your potential is really just to Be.

I used to have this poem printed out and pinned to the cubicle beside my computer. I would read it often, until I had imbibed it to the point that I can summon a line from it when my intuition tells me I need to.

The poem is like a spell that worked on me. It freed me from my prison of perfectionism. What a gift it has been. I hope it is one for you, too.