What It Means to Feel Alive

I turned on the camera to record my first Living Letter on video, and almost immediately, I couldn’t get the word “articulately” out.

I tried a few times. Still couldn’t say it.

So there it was. My first example of this being messy, raw, and unedited. I’ve had some resistance to speaking while being filmed. A friend encouraged me to try putting videos on YouTube, and I decided to see how it goes.

I had just come out of THE PRACTICE, our Tuesday gathering. One of the men was sharing about the energy he was feeling in his life, and it brought up something in me about aliveness.

What does it mean to be alive? And what does it mean to actually feel alive?

Practicing being here

I’m nine months into a year-long meditation program called A Year to Live, through Spirit Rock. The question we sit with is this: if we knew we had one year to live, how would we live our lives?

Every morning, I meditate with that question. It has been helping me savor the moments I’m in. I notice when I get distracted, when I’m caught in my thoughts, or when I’m somewhere other than here. And I practice coming back, over and over again.

I find something beautiful in being willing to talk about our death. It brings me into contact with the life I have now.

I hope I have several more decades ahead of me. If I don’t, I know I’ll have spent this year practicing being as present as I can. That matters to me.

Discovering aliveness later in life

Some of the people in this program are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. When I hear them describe discovering what aliveness means to them, I feel grateful. There is something moving about a person realizing: I have a body. I have experiences. I can actually be in those experiences.

I feel sadness, too. I think about people close to me and wonder whether they have had room to get to know themselves in that way.

I also don’t know everyone’s story. I don’t know what they have lived through, what they have carried, or what it has taken for them to arrive here.

I understand that there are careers, families, and responsibilities. Sometimes those responsibilities take us away from getting to know who we are. I want more of us to have the opportunity to notice our lives while we are living them.

The difficult feelings belong here too

When I talk about aliveness, I mean the whole human experience. Gratitude and calm are part of it. So are sadness, anger, rejection, and heartbreak.

We can have an image of being alive that looks like sitting cross-legged on a mountain, feeling peaceful every day. And sure, that can be an experience of aliveness. But what about the day we are grieving? What about the moment we feel ashamed, frustrated, or uncertain?

Those experiences happen within our lives, too. We are here in them.

So I want to offer you a question. Whatever you are experiencing right now, what if that were part of your sense of aliveness?

If you are feeling heartbreak or loss, what would it be like to recognize: this is what being alive feels like for me in this moment?

That question does not require you to be grateful for what hurts. It gives you somewhere to begin with the experience you are already having.

And I wonder what else we might notice when we make room for that experience. Maybe some softness. Maybe a moment of connection or a little calm. I’m curious about what becomes possible when we let ourselves be here.

The life underneath the goals

I believe in aspirations. I believe in moving toward things that give us purpose and meaning, and in feeling accomplishment and success.

I also feel that we lose something when we move mindlessly through life, checking off boxes while becoming numb to what we are experiencing along the way.

For what?

I want us to have room to notice what the life we are building actually feels like. The challenge, the uncertainty, the moments that move us. I don’t want us to wait until much later to ask whether we have been present for it.

Here I am practicing

Recording this video gave me something very immediate to practice with. It felt different to see myself on camera, talking to myself. It was uncomfortable, and I kept going.

I could be present to the challenge in front of me. I could take the risk and give myself a chance to develop more comfort with it.

That was my experience of aliveness in this moment. A camera, a word I couldn’t quite say, and something I wanted to share with you.

What is yours?

I’d love to hear your reflections.