Being alive is not pure bliss. It is pursuing meaning that justifies the inherent suffering that comes with life. For animals, reproduction and survival are the programmed meaning that drives their being. But we have been given a blessing or curse to realize our own existence. Those primal drives are merely givens. We need to find and construct our own meaning to endure not only physical pain, but mental and emotional turmoil.
Some dimensions of being alive:
Presence- to be completely in this vessel of our body. To feel blood coursing through our veins, the sun’s warmth stroking our skin, homemade soup cradling our insides.
Connection- to listen and open our hearts to each other, nature, or something greater. To feel that we are not alone in this endeavor and to realize that we do not have to harbor the complexity of the human experience alone.
Growth- to do things even with fear and failure. To embrace the messiness of becoming better at something and understand that evolution is a trial-and-error process, not a linear, predictable path.
Freedom- to realize that you can choose differently right now. Taking responsibility for how you feel about your life is the greatest liberator. For you find that you can decide to change it right now and live according to what feels right for you. New horizons only appear when you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Creating- to harness the power of your imagination and execution. To take something from your minds eye and relentlessly work to bring it into reality, subconsciously knowing it will never be like you imagined it, but the pursuit of it is an infinite well of energy and meaning.
Play- to realize we are all just floating on a rock with finite time that is all too short to suffer for rewards you don’t care about. The reward is being here, is getting to experience life. Don’t be too busy planning and thinking that you forget to live it.
Feeling- to want to experience the highs and lows instead of a flatline. To realize that life comes from the peaks and troughs, from joy and sorrow, from intensity and rest.
For birds, insects, dogs, pine trees, and roses, the urge to live exists in the biological wiring, in the instincts encoded with DNA. But for us, our mind and society has distracted us so much from what it means to be alive, that we forget. We continue to exist and call it living, even when our eyes show otherwise. We must get good again at listening and feeling our urges. When you have lived so long for expectations, routines, and others, listening to yourself feels like waking up and trying to remember a dream. A small tug towards something that once happened, but it was so strange and beautiful, that maybe it didn’t even happen at all. But it exists. The feeling of being alive, of overflowing, of being full, not just for a moment, but for a lifetime, exists if you have the courage for it.
“[…] The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.” — D.H Lawrence