Your soul is calling.
Pick up, says Sarah Wilson

While touring the book, Wilson noticed a recurring theme emerge at her Q&A sessions: the personal anxiety she’d been grappling with was also playing out on a collective level. “It was like the whole world was itching,” she said.

“We were all experiencing a crisis of disconnection – from one another, from our true values, from joy, and from life as we were meant to be living it.” Wilson felt this disconnection acutely in relation to the destruction of our planet. “We were talking about carbon emissions and plastic-free July, but nobody was really talking about it at the spirit, soul, or nature level.”

Answering the soul’s call

One of Wilson’s favorite phrases comes from Jungian analyst Dr. James Hollis, who says, “Our souls call us to an appointment with life.” Wilson knew she had found hers. It was time to tackle a ‘bigger beast’.

In search of solutions to our collective malaise, Wilson embarked on a three-year adventure where she hiked around the world and interviewed over 100 scientists, philosophers, psychologists, poets, artists and activists.

Two days before her book was due at the printers, Australia was struck with apocalyptic bushfires that left over 243,000 square kilometers incinerated, 3500 homes destroyed, and billions of animals killed. Wilson recalled the book so she could update it to better reflect the planetary devastation she was witnessing.

During the rewrite, Covid swallowed the world, George Floyd’s death triggered mass civil unrest, and Wilson found herself “writing the book in real-time,” while leaning into the wisdom she’d curated on her three-year trek.

What are you going to do with your life?

When This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World was finally released, Wilson dedicated it ‘to young people’ and opened it with the seductive provocation, “Do you want to sleep through a revolution, or do you want to wake up and reclaim your one wild and precious life?”

Wilson describes her book as, “a soul’s journey through the complexities of climate change, coronavirus, racial inequalities, and our disconnection from what matters.” Weaving deeply personal experiences like her struggles with fertility and loss, with poetic concepts like ‘soul nerding’ and philotimo, her book gifts readers with a roadmap to, “reawaken to life’s wildness, wonder and existential stakes.” It was another award-winning hit, and its success inspired Wilson to launch a podcast that has hosted icons such as Sia, Yael Stone and Alain de Botton, as well as leading climate thinkers such as Michael Mann, Paul Hawken, and Kim Stanley Robinson. 

After founding the I Quit Sugar movement, and ‘quitting’ the business world to become an author, Wilson became the ambassador for Australia’s I Quit Gas campaign. Her latest mission is to help everyone quit ‘old-world thinking’.

Living beautifully in uncertain times

Now she has found another beast to beautify. On her Substack, she has been serialising a new book on “how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world”, which has now been picked up for publication by Penguin.

For Wilson, the gnarly, tangled mess of challenges facing humanity, and the lack of an adequate intellectual apparatus to combat them, means that even if we can find solutions to our greatest challenges, “things are going to get real”. She’s now concerned that economic shocks and civil unrest threaten to make things “wobbly” long before the full impacts of climate change play out, and suggests that, as the challenges to our fragile and complex civilization compound, we’re going to have to “adult the fuck up” so that we can be of optimum service.

“It’s not about warning people about the threats of collapse. It’s about how we can keep our shit together and be more beautifully human,” she says.

When Wilson first sold her business and donated all her money to charity, the world was a different place, and she wasn’t the enlightened climate advisor and poly-crisis scholar she is today. So how would she give away her fortunes if she had the chance to do it again?

“It would be on the things that connect us and show us that we can love each other. The things that bring people together. I wouldn’t necessarily do the big blockbuster thing. I’d do community – so people can see other people being nice to each other.”