What makes me feel most alive?
On My Own:
* Lounging. When time stands still. When you’re lazily doing nothing and enjoying yourself immensely – usually after work or on a weekend. Just lying on your back on a picnic table in the local park, looking up at the moving clouds. Just being outside in nature without even necessarily moving, lounging as time goes by.
* Pushing myself in sports. Running. Swimming. To total exertion – talk about “alive!”
* Getting past a challenge. Daring myself and then doing it. (Like the ideas in The Game of Work – just setting new metrics to get better at. Or doing something risky – like making an announcement in a crowded train.)
With People:
* Debating and Story-telling. My really good friend says that the two times time when people are most alive are when they are debating something with each other (because then their brains have to be active, have to be engaged in the back-and-forth), and when they’re telling stories (because then their brains are actively reliving those stories).
* SPORTS! Rock climbing. Hoops. Volleyball. Hiking. Rollerblading.
* Outdoorness. Even separately from sports, being outside – hiking, rock climbing, running into the cold east-coast ocean on July 4.
* Finishing a project. For work or with classmates. This is such a good feeling.
* Just lounging with people you really like. Nothing is sometimes a very, very good activity.
I feel like I am a delineating the different activities even a little too much. All I really mean to say is that activities that push me make me feel the most alive! (Many would call that flow.) And activities that quiet me also make me feel most alive. Push me and quiet me. :)
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What makes you feel most alive?
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On Fridays, I post questions because I love questions. I would love it if you feel like answering the questions! Thanks. (I’m a big fan of privacy also, so if you don’t want to put your name in, just use an initial or just fill in the letter “A†and we’ll know it’s anonymous, and if you don’t want to put your email address for privacy reasons, just put mine – it’s at the link ‘email me’ above.)
I associate being alive with feeling joyful and connected and aware of my physical presence as part of the world, and the world returning the favor through providing a world-sized experience. I can think of a few things:
++ Walking through a quiet forest on a trail, listening to the trees whispering and the birds reporting on my every move, then bursting into a small clearing overlooking a lake, with the bright sun streaming down and dazzling me with the scale of nature’s beauty and my being part of it…this is an experience moment!
++ Being around people who are excited about creating these moments for themselves, creatively and positively!
++ The sudden darkening of the sky when it’s about to pull a surprise thunderstorm, and I’m outside without an umbrella.
++ Times of quiet solitude with friends and family, chilling out and just enjoying being in the same time and place, comfortable and secure in each other’s company, and exchanging contented smiles.
++ Discovering a secret, of which there are many if you just open your eyes to look. I try to remember this, but it’s surprisingly difficult if you’re doing the same stuff every day!
++ Having the strength to make one’s self vulnerable to others, and having that pay off in the form of a relationship. In other words, negotiation :-)
++ Discovering new reserves and new abilities in myself, and relating them to the world. Pushing past uncertainty and resistance, to burst through on the other side (or just barely flopping over, as the case sometimes is :-)
Followup Question!
I think I’m thinking about connectedness (life and living) also; being alive is also a sense of experiencing one’s mortalness and physicality (I got this idea from looking at your list again).
So when I’m feeling ALIVE, as in more physical/animal, I’m less in a mellow mood and more in a competitive mood:
++ Relentlessly pursuing the essence of a thing or experience, and then clarifying it. Thinking broadly and laterally to converge on a novel and satisfying exchange. I love this. Finding the way around things, going through things, punching past things to get to the essence.
++ Engaging in negotiation with people (this sort of follows from the first one), finding that win-win that’s there somewhere, being fast and direct, playing with a purposefully open hand and being absolutely unpertubed by this. That’s the ideal anyway :-)
++ Putting myself into an unpredictable situation, and seeing how I react. Has the training and preparation paid off? Curious!
Doug Sundheim writes about this in the Fast Company weblog:
Six years ago, while coaching a client, I stumbled upon a very important question. We were talking about the idea of living with “no regrets” when I asked him, “When in your life did you feel most alive?” He reflected for a moment and told me about the summer he overcame his fear of water and learned to sail. When he finished he was grinning ear-to-ear. Subsequently, I have asked hundreds of people the same question and have been struck by the similarity of their answers. In particular I’ve noticed 3 themes. (1) Nearly everyone describes a scenario in which they pushed themselves out of their comfort zone and took risks. (2) The OUTCOME of taking the risk is rarely the main thrust of the story – it’s usually the process of taking them that they remember most fondly. (3) When people finish their story, they’ve often got a big smile on their face.
Doug associates feeling most alive with taking risk and pushing yourself through that risk, so he summarizes how to delve deeper into learning about your own attitudes towards aliveness and towards risk in the following (also found here):
Dave! Those are great great great…. so you as well have that distinction that I have, right? That distinction of quiet-alive and pushed-alive? That’s cool. So fun to read your specific answers, and just how you think about the world. Thank you!
Generally…
When I sit back and savor the moment while having dinner or conversation with a group of close friends.
Staring at the big blue sky with the wind in my face.
Funny you should ask that. I saw a movie the other day and a recovering gambling addict said that gambling addicts don’t gamble to win but to lose. It’s when they lose and totally screw up they know they are alive. I suppose that’s right, when things go wrong I’m acutely aware that I’m alive. However, that’s a bit depressing though. Sorry.
Follow up: I’m aware that I’m alive when something unexpectedly goes really right. You catch that cup falling off the table just in time, or something cool like that.
That is a crazy-interesting comment, Grimo1re. That gamblers gamble to lose in order to know that they are alive. There’s something so dark and for that reason interesting in that comment. It’s like the black hole that any of us can fall into.
Reminds me of what I’ve read in pop child psychology – that some kids act up just to get negative attention.
There were studies about which kids grow up the most well-adjusted and those groups that received a lot of positive praise and those that received a lot of negative words both grew up well-adjusted. it was those kids that were ignored or got no response that grew up not well-adjusted. There must be something to wanting negative if you can’t get positive… just like you said, to feel in some way alive. Check out the concept of plastic prickies – negative responses if you can’t get positive ones – in this story “Warm Fuzzies.”
Yes, I really like the feeling of synchronicity and when things seem to go right all at once. I just remembered that feeling of all-togetherness while reading your answer, Grimo1re. Thanks.