YOLO

During family time at the holidays, my 14-year-old nephew frequently said YOLO in conversation or the midst of games. Perhaps you, like his square auntie, need explication.  YOLO (pronounced yo-low) stands for You Only Live Once. I was impressed by the fact that, despite using it primarily when making a bold move, in Settlers of Cataan for instance, he understood that there are two ways a person can go with YOLO. One extreme would be to do crazy, dangerous or brazen things—you only live once, so live it up! The other extreme would be to be cautious and fearful and play it safe—you only live once, so don’t take any chances. It’s like someone who has nice dishes but keeps them locked away for a special occasion and someone else who figures they’re going to break anyway, so let’s play baseball in the kitchen.

These two sides match up pretty well with two of Patanjali’s causes of suffering (kleshas): raga (attraction, attachment, greediness) and dvesha (aversion, repulsion, hatred). Which is which you can decide for yourself. It seems to me that both sides of YOLO reflect both raga and dvesha—two sides of the same coin, as they say.

With the end of the year and the closure of the old Samarya and other things going on in my life, I have been aware of the temporary nature of things and questions arise for me: “How do I stay fully present and involved when I know something is not going to last?” “How do I give my best to something that may or may not work out?” “How do I stay connected through the ups and downs, ins and outs and changes?”

If we really distill YOLO down, it becomes a moment-by-moment choice. If this is it, what am I going to do right now . . . and right now . . . and right now? After all, my life is made up of moments. The way not to “waste” my life is to be what I want to be in each moment and then to not be too hard on myself when I’m not. When I really sit with YOLO, I can feel both the urgency and the patience of it. Something wells up in me that I would call tenderness, wonder, gratitude, love.

In my recent newsletter, I happened to write the phrase, “Remembering what’s important” and it has stuck with me. This seems like a good aim. You only live once, so remember what’s important.

You can’t really write about all this without including Mary Oliver’s famous line (which I have surely quoted before in this blog). I will include the whole poem here, as it is lovely and it's only the last two lines that get quoted all the time.

The Summer Day

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?



—Mary Oliver, The House of Light, Beacon Press, Boston, 1990