This One Wild and Precious Life - Book Notes

This is the second time I’ve read Sarah Wilson’s ‘This One Wild and Precious Life: a hopeful path forward in a fractured world’. I wanted to revisit this book as I enjoyed my first read of it, but felt there was more for me to discover.

The first part of the book describes a few of the themes that are causing us to feel lonely, despairing, disconnected, overwhelmed, isolated from each other - living in a fractured world. Things like late-stage capitalism and climate change, and the feelings they spark in us, get in the way of our true values, joy, and life as we feel we should be living it.

The second part of the book shows these themes and feelings are exactly what unite us. It explores the itch for a new way of living and some ideas to get us there together.

I mostly took value from the second part of the book. The first part I struggled with because it brings into such sharp focus some of the huge things wrong in our world. Reading page after page of that content raises feelings of anger and despair in me - I spent more time reading the joyful exploration of actions as an antidote to this. That’s kind of the point of the book, understand what we’re dealing with then take action.

My notes are all from the hopeful action part of Wilson’s book. I recommend this book for people who want to explore understanding and action, and who possibly don’t have the patience for data heavy reading. For notes on the understanding part you’ll have to read it yourself!
Every time I read the below notes I get fired up and inspired to continue on my path of caring for the environment, even when it’s hard. If these notes make you feel even a little bit the same, please go and read the book.

• Go to your edge. Do what scares you and embrace discomfort daily. Use it to grow into your Big Life.
• Hike. Walking in nature reconnects us with ourselves, and with our true purpose.
• Get full-fat spiritual. We need to step up from our comfortable inertia, go to our edge, and serve. Spirituality can lead us in this stepping up, reconnecting our morals, and reminding us of the noble worth of the hardest parts - sacrifice, service, radical faith.
  • How are we going to be of service?
  • What are we willing to sacrifice to live our teachings/learnings to save ourselves and the world?
• Show up to your appointment. Once you’re connected and informed enough, your soul will call you.
  • Why am I not doing enough to save this one wild and precious life?
  • Life, what are you asking of me?
• Start where you are. Wherever you are in your life right in this moment is your vehicle for waking up.
  • No hovering around the edges, no waiting for the perfect moment - simply step into the breach. You instantly become necessary and come alive.
  • Start where you are, where you can be of service, not a hero.
  • Action and care beget action and care.
  • Chuck Close: Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work.
  • Isabel Allende: Show up, show up, show up.
• Buy less and live more, wait it out and fend for yourself.
  • Use all your creative and problem-solving skills, we evolved to fend, make something from nothing.
• Kindness is vitally important.
• Pay attention and think critically.
• Embrace discomfort or fear or another uncomfortable feeling and ask, is this the condition that I feared?
• Get anti-fragile. Repeat exposure to shock, random volatility, and hardship help us to survive and thrive.
  • Resilience, grit.
  • Apply it to your morals, your values. Sit and endure the struggle.
  • Cultivate it, make it a habit.
  • Mantra "stay longer". In the pause between where you've just been and where you desire to be.
  • The pause is important, quiet, intimate. Simply stay there, be with yourself and enjoy the peace that comes with being okay with where you are.
  • Observe what your mind, soul, and body do.
  • Staying longer in the pause allows you to bear with problems until they solve themselves, or life solves them for you.
• Be comfortable not knowing. Let go of trying to control life and let it go where it may.
  • Suck it up, princess. Cope, endure, get over yourself.
  • Switch to experimenting with the unknown, wait and see what happens. Frantic is replaced with lightness, playfulness.
• Get wild. Join nature in her anger.
  • It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
• Become adult. Break out of the culture keeping us in adolescence - grow up and take responsibility, for your life and the planet.
  • Quit the excuses and own the situation.
  • Do what needs to be done because no one else is doing it.
  • This is what we've been looking for, we've been aching to step up and connect with life.
  • Personal happiness and pleasure < the honour of doing what's right.
  • We must do what is necessary, don't worry about what others are doing or not doing.
  • Stop making change and its creation a 'war', it should be coming from a love for the planet and humanity so big that nothing can get in our way.
  • Truly time-poor, or choosing to be sucked into what's unnecessary. There's no trap, no one making us do these things.
  • Once basics are met, it becomes a choice.
  • Just stop, and make a decision. Stay stuck or sacrifice for what really matters?
  • Allows us to be present and ready for life.
• To be conscious today, is to be in a constant state of rage.

In conclusion, all the things going wrong in the world are symptoms - and technology is an enabler. No one is coming to save us. This needs to be a social revolution of us getting fired up, awake, adult.
The answer to this question, 'What did you do to fight climate change?', should be 'Everything'. 'What did you do to save this one wild and precious life?', 'Everything I could'.

​This is your time. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.