If you were stripped of absolutely everything and it didn’t matter what you looked like, it didn’t matter what you owned, what’s left? What would make life worth living?

I interviewed legendary Sarah Wilson for Metro about her new book This One Wild and Precious Life and she challenges us to ask the big, beautiful questions.

[photos: Rob Palmer]

I interviewed

Sarah Wilson

last week.

Sarah is somewhat of a legend.

Editor of Cosmopolitan Australia at age 29, host of MasterChef Australia, and a former journalist who has interviewed two Australian Prime Ministers, Beyoncé, Brené Brown, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She was ranked as one of the top 200 most influential authors in the world (two years in a row), described as “the climate queen” and “f*cking wild” (by Russell Brand).

Four years ago, she decided to leave her multi-million pound wellness ‘I Quit Sugar’ empire and gave it all to charity.

Why? “The business got to a point where it had gone from being a joy - creating, inventing, connecting with people - to a business concern. It felt soul-destroying. It felt wrong.”

So she walked away. “Money doesn’t matter to me. I am aware that nobody else does it this way – that it seems insane,’ she says. ‘But I’ve always wanted to challenge the capitalist model.”

Now, she lives a minimalist life writing books, hosting her podcast Wild and writing her newsletter.

I got to interview Sarah for Metro newspaper about the UK release of her latest book This One Wild and Precious Life, out on August 31.

It’s a brilliant, inspiring and hard-hitting book.

And it’s exactly the book I needed to read post-Covid, post-big job, post-childgoingtouniversity, post-relationship breakup, post-moving into a tiny apartment on the wild coast of Northumberland and I figure out where I want to focus my energy, how I want to contribute and how I want to live.

The whole interview is here. But here are some powerful take-aways and questions:

What inspired Sarah to write the book?

“I had been feeling an anxious despair that went beyond my own internal anxiety and pain, which is what I had explored in last book first, we make the beast beautiful. I knew we were all feeling it, particularly around the destruction of our planet and life as we love it, and no one was really talking about it at a spirit/soul/nature level. We were talking carbon emissions and plastic-free July and getting frustrated and devastatingly sad,” she says. “This was not how life was meant to go! We are better than this! We have become ‘small humans’ when we really want to live a big life! I knew intuitively there was a better way… a wilder, more connected, more meaningful way. I wanted to find it.”

Moral loneliness?

Sarah’s quest to find meaningful new way brought her to the conclusion that we are suffering from a ‘moral loneliness’. She describes this as the terrifying state ‘when the supply cord to connection, caring and doing the right thing by each other and the planet has been severed. We can’t tap into the point of life, to what matters. When you don’t know your true north, the disorientation is terrifying.’

The Greeks, she explains, called this moral loneliness ‘acedia’, a state of spiritual apathy or listless sloth. “As I ventured into the early stages of this journey, I quickly realised it was at the root of our disconnect from this one wild and precious life we’d been granted.”

Try a little soul-nerding

Sarah explored a myriad way of re-connecting from ‘soul-nerding’ – committing to reading and learning and being inspired by leaders in evolutionary biology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and immersing ourselves in great literature, art and poetry to hiking in nature (‘I found over 42,000 studies which prove that walking in nature will not only bring you a sense of joy but a sense of belonging,’ she says.) She also recommends asking ‘beautiful’ questions. “It’s time we look ourselves in the mirror and ask - If you were stripped of absolutely everything and it didn't matter what you looked like, it didn't matter what you owned, what's left? What would make life worth living?”

Seeking the answers to these questions will wake us up from our spiritual apathy, she says. “Do you want to get sucked into the capitalist matrix and spent your precious life in a shopping centre, following the herd? Or do you want to truly live, create magic, and suck the juice out of every moment? ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ is the question the poet Mary Oliver posed and that inspired the title of the book - and my life,” says Sarah.

This One Wild and Precious Life: The path back to connection in a fractured world is out on the 31st August.

You can pre-order it here.