On being alive
Since I’m sure you want an update on these mites, we think no new ones are coming into the house, so all we have to do is wait the 3-4 weeks it takes for the ones that already made it inside to die off. I only look like I have a mild case of chickenpocks this time, as opposed to severe, so I’m happy.
But enough on that topic!
Today I want to talk about being alive. I asked N the other day who the most alive person he knows is, and we ended up having a great conversation exploring what that means. Who is the most alive person you know? What makes you think of them that way?
It seems like there are different ways to understand alive. Maybe one is about the opposite of being numb. People who are always trying to be as present as they can be to what they experience, to what they feel, to who they are. Who don’t seem like they’re running from something. People who don’t want to ignore the daily news and are uncomfortable with the way it’s impossible not to sometimes. People who feel joy and sorrow and anger and fear and peace and worry and everything else. People who aren’t numb. People alive this way aren’t always having fun, but I think they’re not always tormented, either. They probably have the greatest capacity for joy.
Another way to think about alive could be people who have an enlivening hope. Something their bodies or minds or souls are yearning toward and working toward and feeling glad about. People connected with a sense of mission, a reason for being alive, a fire in their bellies, whether that be for connecting with another person, winning a medal, making some discovery, landing a dream job. Knowing God, even, or trying to make the world a better place. Aliveness in this sense is about the hope, rather than duty or the desire to avoid something negative. By and large, I think people alive in this way like to get up in the morning.
But what do you think? Are there other ways of looking at this? Like what does it look like for parents of collicy newborns to be alive? People with chronic pain? With significant losses? Is the greatest potential for aliveness somewhere inbetween the extremes of tranquility and suffering, or can it reach to these extremes, too?
June 8th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Guess there are so many ways to be alive, and things to be alive to - and dead to, while you’re alive - that for me it’s kind of a difficult word to work with. I might want to ask something like: what is joy, or what is peace, and stick to being alive as a general matter of living and breathing!
I’m assuming, for example, that you like being dead to chickenpox! (I had it when I was 19, bad. They told me if you don’t get it as a kid, you get it worse…)
June 8th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
You’re right, Darius, alive can be a nebulous word. I like it for that reason, though, since the idea I’m thinking about is multivalent…though I suppose less nebulous words can be too…
Yes, I am glad to be dead to chickenpox! My memories of them are not fond either.
June 9th, 2006 at 11:22 am
I think that maybe to be alive (the way you are talking about it) is to have desires. Desires along with at least some hope that they can be fulfilled. They could be for a variety of things (e.g., basic needs, deeper yearnings about the world, etc.) that may or may not be realized, but the person still desires them and has some hope that they can come about. Perhaps with the combination of those two things comes an energy that others may observe as looking “alive.”
June 9th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
I like that way of saying it, Nate. Seems like a clearer way of describing the enlivening hope idea I was playing with.
June 9th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
When I think of being alive in a way that is more than just breathing, I think of embracing life, even when you get flea bit or chicken pox. It is writing a novel when you get thrown into a Siberian prison for writing novels, like Alex Solzhenitsyn. Or risking all, including your ideals, to eliminate Hitler, like Dietrich Bonhoefer, and having failed, not regretting having tried. But it can also mean crowding into the walkway behind right field shoulder to shoulder with a hundred other fans all hoping to have a chance at catching a Bonds home run ball. I guess to me it means being passionate about moving in the world and making hard contact with the earth and people and ideas.