On Making a Life from Within

From the moment we are born, human life seems shaped, at times almost driven, by a peculiar kind of search going on within us. So much so, in fact, that much of our lives is spent trying to understand what, exactly, we are searching for. Some of us will spend a lifetime grappling with the nature of God. Others may spend years looking back toward who they were before their suffering began. Still others may wonder why, as life goes on, we feel compelled to change something in our past that cannot be undone.

Searches like these are often placed under the larger idea that human beings are meaning-making creatures. Of course, meaning has its place. But for me, it is not where the human story begins. Before we can make meaning of something, anything, in life, we first have to find what becomes meaningful to us.

But early on, this creates a dilemma. How do we begin to figure out what deserves our attention in a world we do not yet understand? How do we know what will become important before we have had enough life experience to know ourselves clearly? This is where the search in life often becomes especially difficult: we are not born knowing what will later become meaningful to us.

Part of the problem is that, from the beginning, we are surrounded by endless possibilities that may interest us, while other people are also telling us what we should pay attention to. To complicate matters further, what helps one person find their way in life may not help another person find theirs. This is why we cannot simply follow what is meaningful to others and expect it to become the answer for us. At some point, if we are not to feel disconnected from what helps us feel more alive, the question of how to go about living our lives has to become a more inward and individual form of exploration.

Feeling Emotionally Disconnected from Ourselves

Near the start of the pandemic, John had been feeling more uneasy and restless than he cared to admit. His wife had noticed it too, and suggested he speak with someone. At first, John politely brushed off her suggestion, telling her it was probably just the added stress of the pandemic. Then one afternoon, he found himself watching an old episode of As the World Turns.

After that afternoon, he went looking for old episodes of the soap opera and eventually bought a box set on DVD. John decided to call me after his wife came home from an afternoon of shopping and found him still in his bathrobe, unshowered, after he had watched four episodes of the show. What disturbed him was not that he had spent his afternoon watching television, but that he felt angry with his wife for interrupting him while he was doing so. Until then, he had been able to treat the whole thing as an odd, harmless distraction. But in that moment, he knew something else was going on, even though he did not understand what it was.

When we began talking about it, John felt foolish saying all of this out loud. He also felt confused by why he felt compelled to keep watching the show, especially because the more he watched, the more numb he began to feel.

After some time passed, John mentioned, almost in passing, that this particular soap opera had often been on in the house when he was a boy. His mother used to watch it, and when the episode was over, she would go outside and play with him in the backyard. She had been a single mother, and John did not get a lot of time with her while he was growing up. But those afternoons stayed with him: the two of them playing frisbee, catch, and hide-and-seek, both of them happy in those moments. His mother had died a few years earlier, and John did not talk about her much.

John had a good life. He loved his children, cared about his marriage, and took pride in his work as an architect. His outer life, and the time he had put into building it, was not the problem for John. It brought him a great deal of comfort and enjoyment. But when the pandemic hit and John found himself alone with himself inside, something felt off in a way he had a hard time describing.

While John missed aspects of his childhood, his childhood had also been marked by periods of financial worry and anxieties about being left alone at a young age while his mother worked two jobs to make ends meet. What he missed was not childhood, but the feeling of being free for a while, of playing without anything being asked of him, and feeling happy with his mother while she was still alive.

Without fully knowing it, John was trying to find his way back to the sense of freedom and play he remembered from childhood. The difficulty was that the show brought him closer to this memory while also creating the opposite experience within him: he felt deadened inside. It left him longing for a sense of freedom and aliveness in his present life, though he didn’t quite understand this at the time.

For many of us, as with John, we sometimes have to look far back into our past to remember when feeling alive did not feel so difficult. The painful part often comes when we are surrounded by people we love, or doing things we usually enjoy, and still feel disconnected from ourselves in the process.

Bringing Aliveness into Being

The irony is that many of us only begin to pay closer attention to our aliveness after we have gone without it for too long. By then, our health may have already been affected, or our suffering may have increased to the point where it becomes harder to bear. The harder question, however, is often not only what might help us feel alive again, but how we begin to participate with life in ways that help bring that aliveness back into being.

Though the landscape of aliveness has many ways to enter it, one central way is through longing, because longing is often what remains when aliveness goes missing within us for too long.

But longing has a way of complicating what we think we are searching for, because it is tied to desire and a host of other feelings at the same time. It can draw our attention toward a part of life, whether in our past or in some not-yet-experienced future, that seems, at least from a distance, to touch us more deeply than life currently does. And yet longing may point not only toward what actually happened, but toward what we wished had happened, or what we wish could still be brought into our present life. What we are searching for may appear, at first, as a wish to return to another version of ourselves or to move toward a version of life we have not yet known.

The difficulty is that we can spend long periods of our lives emotionally organized around a past self, a lost relationship, a wished-for future, or a fantasy of another life. The feeling may be real. The sadness may be real. The ache may be real. But if longing remains tied to what we can no longer experience, or to what may never come into being, it can keep us intensely alive and emotionally attached to what is absent without helping us discover what form that feeling could take in our present-day life.

And yet longing is not only a problem. If we can listen to our longing without letting it keep us solely emotionally organized around what is absent, it can begin to clarify what it is we want, or think we want. In this sense, longing often carries both hope and motivation within it, and without some connection to these, life can become even harder to bear.

This is where longing can become useful: when we stop using it only as evidence of what is missing in our lives and begin to receive it as a rare form of inward listening. If longing points us backward or forward, the work of listening eventually has to return us to who we are in this present moment, because whatever aliveness we are searching for has to become possible within our innermost experience. In this way, longing can become a doorway into a deeper form of listening, helping us hear what our spirit is asking us to bring into existence.

In John’s case, this meant understanding his longing not only as a feeling related to what was missing, but as a question about what could still be brought into his present-day life. The memory of playing with his mother with abandon and enjoyment, tied as it was to As the World Turns, did not mean the show could give him back what he was missing.

At first, he did not understand why he kept going back to the show. What was difficult for him to hear was the connection between the show and what had once followed it: his mother finishing the episode, the two of them going outside, and the feeling of play and freedom that he did not have in his current life. The harder question for John was how he could bring this aspect of life back into existence for himself now that his mother was gone. Maybe this would mean playing outside with his children and seeing whether some part of that older feeling of freedom could return, or maybe it would mean speaking with me and his wife about what he missed most about his mother.

This is where the search becomes deeply personal and individual. We may be guided by other people’s accounts of how they find their way toward their own aliveness, but we cannot simply borrow another person’s way and expect it to become ours. Other people can help us see possibilities for our own lives, but they cannot finally tell us what will bring our own spirit more fully into being.

I can say that, for me, aliveness has something to do with love and affection, and with being able to meet the world with some sense of awe, but saying this does not tell another person where their own aliveness will be found, or what their own spirit may be asking of them. Nor can I do the work of finding it and bringing it into existence for them. Each of us still has to listen for what, in our own life, brings us closer to the feeling of being inwardly alive.

And if we learn, over time, to listen with this inward ear, we may begin to sense that our aliveness is not only something we feel deep within ourselves, but something that asks us to give it expression in the wider currents of life itself.

Living in Alignment with Our Inner Aliveness

What I mean by giving it expression is that what we discover inwardly eventually has to become something we can connect with and begin living in relation to, or it risks remaining something we understand only at a distance, without becoming part of a deeper and more meaningful experience of feeling alive. But before we can do this in any conscious, thought-through way, we often have to feel some sense of aliveness within ourselves and begin asking not only what this feeling is, but what helps produce it to begin with.

The risk, as we see with John, is that once some sense of aliveness appears and then fades, we may not stop to ask what happened to the connection. For if life unfolds through movements and phases, our experience of aliveness ebbs and flows as well. In this sense, part of what helps us sustain this inner aliveness is learning not only how to find our place within the life around us, but how to stay in contact with the life moving within us.

And yet when we lose contact with this inner aliveness, we often come into contact with one of the harder facets of being human: our own suffering. To live with aliveness is also to know what it is to lose contact with it. For many of us, when this happens, we begin searching for what has gone missing.

Some of us come to this search through spirituality, others through healing, and still others through a desire for greater wholeness. And some of us, like myself, come to understand this search through a combination of all three. But however we come to this search, and whatever language we use, part of what we are trying to understand is what helps us feel less divided from ourselves and more able to participate in our own aliveness again.

These are not answers that can simply be handed down to us by someone we believe knows more about life than we do. They have to be tested in the life we are actually living. This does not mean we have to do the work alone. Other people, with their own traditions and ideas about how to live life, may help guide us, but they also carry the risk that we use them to replace the more difficult task of listening for, and figuring out, what is true for us within ourselves.

Still, I can point you toward what has helped me, and what seems to help many others: being out in nature, connecting with a wider sense of awe, turning inward through movement or meditation, focusing on gratitude, kindness, and love, becoming part of a larger community, giving time to what we are passionate about, and learning how to live with more purpose and intention.

But none of this can be taken up abstractly, as though these ideas exist separate from how we go about living our lives. What does gratitude mean when we are angry or hurt? What does becoming a better person look like if we are driven mostly by fear, pain, or the pressure to make more money? What helps me feel alive may not be what helps you feel alive, and vice versa, and what helps you feel alive may not be what anyone around you would choose or recognize as important. This is where the search becomes much more difficult and more personal, because each of us has to find out what these ideas mean to us, and how they do or do not fit into our own lives.

And so the search often becomes more meaningful and, over time, a touch easier when we are willing to listen to the different parts of ourselves that contribute to our sense of aliveness. Part of the work is learning to listen for what we most deeply hope for and desire, while also asking whether what we are drawn to is good for us in mind, body, and spirit. This kind of listening asks us to discern whether what we are drawn toward is keeping us organized around our suffering or helping us move closer to what helps us feel alive. This is how I understand alignment: as learning how to live in closer contact with the parts of ourselves, and the parts of life, that help us feel alive and become healthier and more fully ourselves.

Part of the struggle in life is that, at times, we may already know what will help us feel better, but still find ourselves unable to move toward it in ways we know will help us. At other times, life becomes more difficult because we are not quite sure what will help us feel better, or why we feel as bad as we do. I have found it important to understand both of these human experiences in relation to our aliveness, because suffering can change how we respond to ourselves, to what helps us feel alive, and to the possibility of finding our way back again.

This became part of the work with John: helping him understand how the show was tied to his memory of playing with his mother, and how some part of that older aliveness might find a place in his present-day life. The work was not simply to get John to stop watching the show or explain it away. It meant trying to play more freely with his children and speaking with his wife about what he missed, including his mother, rather than keeping the longing sealed inside a private world he had not fully shared with others or with himself. His past did not have to be repeated exactly; it could help him discover what part of his earlier aliveness could still be experienced in his current life.

Maybe this is the deeper work beneath the search for our aliveness: learning how to listen for what is good for us, and then finding ways, over time, to live more in alignment with what we find. When what is good for us in mind, body, and spirit begins working together in a synergistic way, each part can deepen and support the others, and we may begin to experience a unique kind of aliveness. Others might describe this as a spiritual experience, a form of healing, or even a kind of communion, and in certain ways it taps into aspects of all three. This is what I have come to think of as the spirit of alignment: the unique aliveness that emerges when our mind, body, and spirit begin working together in a way that brings us closer to the sacred dimensions of life.

Author’s Note

This essay is part of my larger work on The Wellbeing Equation, where I explore how each of us comes to understand what helps us live with more aliveness, health, and inner connection over time. Here, I am trying to follow one question more deeply: how do we learn to live closer to what helps us feel alive? In this piece, I approach that question through longing, inward listening, and the spiritual dimensions of alignment.

For readers who want to go further into the question of how we come to know what is true within ourselves, my paid essay, On Inward Knowing and What Becomes Ours, explores this related theme more fully.

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