To Find a Life That Makes You Feel Alive
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist. That is all.” -Oscar Wilde
Recently, I bought this pack of cards on Amazon called Empowering Questions. It contains 52 cards with different life examining questions on each card. I have been on this self-discovery journey and asking myself deep questions is a good way for me to dive deeper into my soul. I have found that meditation has been such a beautiful help in this process, it helps me feel so close to my soul and I become emotional at times because this is the closest I have ever felt to really knowing myself on a much deeper level. This is the closest I have felt to my soul and it just feels so refreshing. I am starting to examine my insecurities and discover ways to cope with these insecurities in my daily life. I want to use these cards to prompt my blog post entries because this self-discovery journey has so painful, yet beautiful in so many ways and I love sharing it with you. I have grown to love writing even on the days when I don’t feel like doing it. I want to write a book but I am still unsure of what a good book would be about. (If you have some good suggestions, let me know!)
The first card I drew out of my deck asks this question: Am I doing more of the things that keep me alive, or more of the things that make me feel alive? What makes me feel alive?
Am I doing more of the things that keep me alive? Let’s see…I would honestly say yes, I do more of the things that “keep me alive.” I go to a job to pay the bills and make enough money to survive. I go to things that I don’t want to go to. I feel like I center my life around my work schedule and it becomes very stressful sometimes. To me, time is valuable. My time off flies by so fast and I become very anxious and upset when my days all seem to come and go. I feel like I try to live my life by trying to get through my work days to enjoy days off, only to be sad when they are over. I repeat this process over and over again. This is no life to live, trust me. I don’t go out and enjoy things because I feel most at home when I have my headphones on and I am in my element either reading, writing, listening to music, and/or meditating. I feel like it is important to survive but I feel like this is what my life is missing: LIVING.
I feel like so much of my life has been wasted within the last few years because I have spent it doing things I do not particularly enjoy doing. I have missed out on traveling and fulfilling my sense of wonder by setting myself in this mindset to get a degree, get a job, and go to work. I don’t regret pushing myself because I would not be sitting here, on this couch, with this laptop writing about my self-discovery journey without taking that life path. I would not have met patients who have touched my life, and I would not have learned what it truly means to be grateful and empathetic without taking this path. I only regret that I spent so much time forcing myself to believe that the only way to live a fulfilling life is to have a good job with decent paychecks. Money is just an object that sadly, our life revolves around. We have to have money to survive, to pay bills, and purchase food. If we want to travel and see the world, we have to have money for that too. I just find it hard to regret things in life because we take different paths in life for a reason. The only way to go from here is up, so now I plan to create my own paths to lead me to the right destination where I feel like I belong the most.
What makes me feel alive? I feel alive when I am in my bathtub filled with hot water and Epsom salt, relaxing with aromatherapy, all while listening to a Bachelor-related podcast to keep my mind from wandering. I am most alive when I write my blogs and I find myself feeling emotional and/or tearful about all of these new thoughts and feelings I have been experiencing. I feel most alive when I am next to the ocean, feeling the warm salt water hit my feet with each wave that rolls in to shore, pulling sand from beneath my toes. I feel most alive when I look at the beautiful ocean, feeling so small as I think about the distance from my location and another location beyond the horizon. I feel most alive when I dream of climbing mountains, seeing the world from higher up, all while feeling the cool breeze around me. I feel alive when I am doing a guided meditation and start to drift off into another universe, forgetting about the stress of today and the potential worries of tomorrow. I feel alive when I surround myself with people who bring out the best in me, refrain from judging me, and I can express myself the way I feel most comfortable. I feel alive when I know I touched someone’s life or helped someone who is struggling feel even the slightest bit better even if it was only for a second.
It’s hard to live rather than exist and I know so many people can relate. We all want to live, experience new places, find our sense of direction somewhere out in the world but for some people, it is just not obtainable. Is it because we are scared of leaving our comfort zone? Is it because we are scared to let go of our current life for a new one? Is it because we are struggling to make ends meet with the current paychecks we get? There could be a million reasons why we cannot really live. Each individual person will find their sense of living through different experiences. Someone might feel most alive when they are reading a book, going to the club, or enjoying time with their family. Love might make people feel alive. Ultimately, to feel alive, we have to understand what feeling it is that we are searching for.
In order to feel alive, you must find a sense of inner peace within yourself.
You feel this sense of passion, and excitement that make you feel weightless in a gravitational force. To me, feeling alive means to feel whole, mentally, spiritually, and physically. It’s that butterflies in the stomach, empowering feeling, heart skipping a beat, breaths become shallow kind of feeling to feel fully alive. To discover the answer to this question that this card asks, you have to examine yourself. What am I doing that gives me inner peace? What am I willing to give up to survive? How much of myself am I having to give up just to make ends meet? You have to find a balance between doing things that keep you alive and doing things that make you feel alive. Maybe, you might get lucky and the two might end up being the same thing. Always remember to avoid the people, places, and situations that hinder your own personal growth. Do not let anyone, any job, or any stress dim the light that shines within you. Find the things that make you feel alive and embrace them. After all, you have to always find time for the things that make you feel happy to be alive.
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