"It Is a Serious Thing Just To Be Alive"

Mary Oliver’s poem “Invitation” will be one of my favorites from her. I enjoy her vivid poems best—those that paint a specific story—but, occasionally, she has these “preachy” poems where she presents her general thoughts about life. One of these poems is “Invitation.”

“Invitation” is a poem about doing things just for the sake of doing them. It’s a poem about things we love so much that doing them is their own purpose. It’s also a poem about “not doing”—not doing certain activities for others, not doing certain activities for money, but doing them entirely for oneself and one’s own pleasure.

Mary Oliver thinks this is a philosophy of living all by itself—a full-blown strategy that could change lives. “It could mean something. It could mean everything,” she says.

Whether or not one approaches life in this fashion determines the quality of one’s life. I share this belief with her as well as with other thinkers whose works have influenced me like Charles Eisenstein and Austin Kleon.

Doing things for the sake of doing them, “living in the Gift” (as Eisenstein puts it)—that realm of moneyless generosity—doing nothing, having full creative freedom, not thinking about pleasing other people, or building an audience, not presenting oneself as an unchanging “brand” or an eternal identity—all of these remind us of the value of not having anything else, other than simply being alive.

“It is a serious thing just to be alive,” the bard of Provincetown reminded us.

While busy striving for goals, we usually forget the immensity of that fact: “We are alive!”

Is that by itself not enough?

All of us need to take the time to sink that fact down our bones. And we need idleness to realize that. It isn’t something that can come easily in the middle of a busy schedule. This truth needs room to breathe itself out.

Pause. Reflect on it and be grateful for being alive.

Do nothing. Or if that’s too hard, do something without the purpose of building yourself a reputation or a retirement fund.

Do something because it makes your heart sing the sweetest song.

This is the reason why I believe in hobbies and having idle time. It is also the reason why I do not sell any of my deepest passions. In fact, I have drawn a clear line between work that earns me money and work that builds my art. Some people combine the two and it works for them perfectly! Not to me. I enjoy complete creative freedom only when I see clear boundaries. If I don’t sell my art, I don’t have to compromise with the demands of an audience, a patron, an investor, or a customer. I can do what I do just for myself, freely, with the purest joy. This is what the word “Gift” means—that which is free from all the constraints of the money economy and everything attached to it—and that realm is what I want to expand through my creative work.

For more about the concept of Gift, read The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde.

You can read Mary Oliver’s brilliant poem, “Invitation,” here.

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