So for this sense of aliveness, to trigger this feeling of aliveness, to maintain it, to keep it coming back, to celebrate aliveness, we can awaken the sense of wonder at the universe that we’re in.
We can celebrate the senses and use the senses to bring out that feeling of experiencing this universe and this existence.
We can use a sense of humour to help to keep our mind loose and not get stuck in sort of stiff and brittle ways of thinking.
And we can keep that sense of playfulness.
We have to see the limits of being disciplined and orderly and self-controlled and trying to improve ourselves and trying to be productive and get things done and achieve things.
All of that goes within kind of- it’s like a form for our lives, but it doesn’t replace the content of actually simply experiencing life.
We can’t let the structure of life become too fixed, so that our life becomes all about work and improvement and achievement.
There has to be place for enjoyment and simple- it’s hard to do sometimes, because we’re trying to be productive, and sometimes these moments of just enjoyment and appreciation, they seem very inefficient, unproductive.
We’re not achieving anything.
Just, you know, maybe experiencing some music or art or nature, or having some laughs, and it just seems like wasting time, but these things, I believe, are absolutely necessary to have a full feeling of aliveness.
We also have to watch out for our use of time, the time continuum.
And we use our notion of the past to learn from, we use our notion of the future to plan, and we can easily get lost in the timeline, sort of living our lives on a schedule, living our lives as you imagine “I am as I was in the past, moving into the future, and here’s what I want to accomplish in this time.” And just imagining each day as a piece of a timeline.
And when it comes to planning and practical activities and getting work done, this is great.
But there’s a limit to how much we can live in some kind of historical timeline, live in time.
It seems like sometimes we just have to break out of that and live purely in the moment.
Let the moment happen, outside any kind of schedule, outside any kind of context of past and future, and just let the moment happen as a present moment, forgetting about time, forgetting about work and our plans.
Basically forgetting memories and plans.
Just let those disappear sometimes, so that we can just experience the moment, as close as possible to being purely in the moment.
There’s also the notion of mind versus body, so being too much in our thoughts.
And I think time is part of that, because time really is a thought.
It’s a mental construct.
Our picture of time, imagining things as being part of a timeline: that seems to be created by our minds.
It’s not something that we’re directly perceiving with our senses, but we sort of construct it.
And so much of our lives is living in this world of mental constructs, that we imagine who we are, what we’re supposed to do, what the world’s like, what other people are like.
These are all these mental constructs that we work with.
But we can get too far into that and start to live in this world of sort of dry, abstract mental constructs, instead of living our life based on the senses around us.
It’s like this top-down mental construction versus bottom-up experience through the senses.
And we need to have that too.
So these are all tools that can be used to reawaken a sense of aliveness, if we start to feel dull and dry and dead and like life doesn’t really feel alive.
And maybe it seems it’s easy to get used to that state, so it doesn’t even feel like anything special.
It just feels normal to have that kind of dry state.
But these are ways to reawaken some kind of sense of aliveness that I believe we all had at some point, maybe as children, but at some point we all had this sense, and maybe we have it on occasion.
Seems to me like we can have it more often, and we can have it stronger, and make this part of our everyday life, to really have a strong feeling of aliveness.
And finally, the last thing that helps me to think this way and feel this way is to just remember the notion of one chance, that we have one chance, one life, one moment.
Each moment exists as a unique moment that will never happen again.
And sometimes it’s almost too intense a feeling to take.
It’s like that feeling of time slipping away.
But it’s not even about a timeline, but simply the fact that the unique combination of everything that’s going on is unique at this moment and unique in every moment, and remembering that.
Time is not just repeated chunks of this defined thing that keeps repeating.
It’s always new, and every moment is always new.
And when I really feel that, then I can be connected to this feeling that “Wow, I’m alive.” So this is one of my favourite topics, and I would love to hear if you have any other methods that you find work for you to bring out this feeling.
#aliveness #feelalive #liveinthemoment