To Live Alive

Varkala, Kerala, India

To live alive 

One of the greatest afflictions of humankind is to live life dead. Yet so many of us fall victim to it.

Routine can create great comfort and a sturdy foundation for growth, but if we let ourselves be pulled through our days, as if on some conveyor belt, our movements can become rote & mechanical. The patterns can get woven into an automaticity that depersonalizes our actions & very way of being. To blindly follow a routine has the capacity to numb our senses. We are ever expecting sameness or alikeness. Yet its opposite is as equally life-giving as it is panic-inducing. If we overvalue predictability, we forget about the power of awe & surprise - the very things that make life come alive.

Life becomes lived in a daze. Colors lose vibrancy. Tunnel vision narrows the horizon. 

When life becomes too safe and too known, our senses deaden. Our eyes don’t need to watch where we’re going because we’ve already been here, we’ve already traveled this way. We can walk the path blind from the innumerable times we’ve already traveled upon it. We must have the wherewithal to know when a programmed routine needs a reboot, a shake-up, or at least a conscious paying attention to it.

If it’s not monotony, perhaps it's too much activation. Too much stress leaves us anxious for what comes next, robbing us of the present. We can’t settle into a moment long enough to fully savor it.

Or, any harrowing experience will lead us to shut off the feeling valve. Too much overwhelms the system and we create a cushion between ourselves and life, only able to feel a fraction of what’s happening. While we smartly create distance between ourselves and the pain of grief, this often transfers to the feelings we desire to feel.

Or, maybe we haven’t learned to move out of a state of great depression. It clings onto us and we cannot shake it. When all we can see is death and all we can feel is pain, we forget that there is good that exists in the world, still.   

The reasons for which the exuberance of life atrophies is unique to the individual, but largely universal to us all. To avoid living in a zombie-like state, we must understand why we’ve become desensitized from the human experience & reclaim embodiment of it for our own.

No matter the reason, life is meant to be lived. It is our sole responsibility to find what makes us feel alive and to devote {some of} our time to living those things.