What makes you feel alive?

Last Saturday I cycled to the local shop which I entered still wearing my cycling helmet (not just this).

“Aah you’re doing things that make you alive”, remarked the assistant.

“What do you mean?”, I asked.

“When you do what you are passionate about, like cycling, it makes you alive”, he replied.

Quite right, I thought as I left and jumped back on my bike. Cycling through picturesque places with the breeze whistling past me, the sun sometimes shining on me and the scenery wowing me, makes me feel alive, happy and free. For me, there are so many activities that I find enlivening and enjoyable. My personal challenge remains in limiting such activities to a level that enriches rather than exhausts my body. There is always a line and I regularly cross it!

In this life we can easily become so consumed by work that we forget to balance this by prioritising play too. That which makes us feel happy and alive helps to carry us through the menial and the mundane.

On Friday night when my partner and I discussed the week he suddenly announced that his learning take-away was,

“I need to spend more time doing things that make me happy”.

This was music to my ears as the observer more able to see him overdoing things than to see this in myself.

Adulting can cause us to lose sight of the role of play and rest in sustaining a sense of aliveness. We must actively address this imbalance or pay the price. For overdoing anything or under doing rest and play can have a draining, deadening, stress enhancing effect. And life is definitely too precious to settle for some half-arsed stress filled substitute.

I was reminded of this again today when I attended a funeral of a wonderful woman. Her life and faith touched many hearts including my own. And as I reflected on her life through the beautiful songs, psalms and stories of the service, I laughed and I cried. The death of a fellow lover of Jesus brings a powerful collision of emotion, both sadness and joy. To lose one we love brings sorrow but to know where they are going is a cause for celebration (and cake obvs). Even more poignant when it brings an end to any form of prolonged pain on earth.

Life is a full bag mixed with joy and sorrow, happy and sad, exciting and boring, from the moment we are born until the moment we die. While culture sometimes encourages us to stuff down our sorrow or focus so hard on work that we forget the joy of play, these emotions are a package deal. By allowing ourselves to honour them all; sadness, joy and all in between, we retain our aliveness. To block out one is to lose both along with our vitality. Life is too precious to settle for a death-in-life experience.

Whether we are grieving, celebrating, laughing, crying, working or playing, our corresponding emotions show us we are still ALIVE.