Each year Harvard Business School graduates ask themselves a simple question
taken from the last lines of a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Mary Oliver.
But, sometimes simple questions aren't so simple to answer.
YOU tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
- The Summer Day by Mary Oliver
- Who made the world?
- Who made the swan, and the black bear?
- Who made the grasshopper?
- This grasshopper, I mean -
- the one who has flung herself
- out of the grass,
- the one who is eating sugar out
- of my hand,
- who is moving her jaws back and
- forth instead of up and down -
- who is gazing around with her
- enormous and complicated eyes.
- Now she lifts her pale forearms and
- thoroughly washes her face.
- Now she snaps her wings open,
- and floats away.
- I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
- I do know how to pay attention,
- how to fall down
- into the grass, how to kneel down
- in the grass,
- how to be idle and blessed, how
- to stroll through the fields,
- which is what I have been doing all day.
- Tell me, what else should I have done?
- 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?
