by Wanda Shirk, President, KTA Board of Directors
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
That question, attributed to Mary Oliver in “The Summer Day,” is posed at the beginning of Part Five of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. I was reading that book and hit that question at the start of 2013. Or maybe I didn’t hit the question as much as the question hit me. Hard.
For Cheryl Strayed, and perhaps for you and me, the answer sometimes is found on the trail, and sometimes the answer is the trail.
I always keep in mind that I have indeed just one, short, wild and precious life. I marvel that so many people can let it slip by while they watch sports or putter at what often appear to me to be rather mundane routines. I’m always wanting to pack as much life and adventure as I can into my one, short, wild and precious life.
For me, the first step in that direction means setting goals, which I write in a journal and evaluate at the end of each year. Last year I listed fourteen goals. Fact is, I often don’t achieve half of them – at least not completely – but what’s most important is that I achieve much more because I have goals than I would if I had none -- if I approached the year, and life, with no direction. As the saying goes, “Aim at nothing and you will likely hit it.”
Examples of last year’s goal analysis: I wanted to backpack the Standing Stone Trail, but I ended up doing the Chuck Keiper instead. (The SST goes back on the list for 2014.) I wanted to hike the Pennsylvania section of Appalachian Trail; I did one-fourth of it, from Pen-Mar to Boiling Springs, 57 miles in three days of slackpacking. I wanted to get to three KTA trail cares, but I exceeded and managed to show up at five. I wanted to run/jog-hike-or-backpack at least 75 miles every month, and that I did, because it’s a fitness discipline to which I consistently hold myself. I wanted to read 24 books, including four classics; I read 21, including three classics.
Thinking about the legacy my life will leave is also always important to me. Stephen Covey, in First Things First, urges that we “live with the end in sight” – establishing priorities perhaps by imagining the memorial service when life is over, and examining our choices to see what commendable results people will be able to see when our time is up. Did we volunteer and put our time, our energy, our creativity, and our money into worthy causes? Did we help some children along the way? What trails have we blazed – perhaps literally! – for others?
Learning to give wisely has been an on-going process for me. My passion is meeting needs where poverty exists around the world, but I also care about meeting local needs, and social and environmental needs factor in as well. We KTA members are a small band, and our cause, Pennsylvania trails, is important, so I make KTA one of my top three charities, the one that gets all I can give in my “environment and nature” category.
I hope you’ll establish worthy goals for 2014 and for your life, and I hope KTA and Pennsylvania footpaths will figure into your dreams and plans. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”