Reflection Essay: What Tending to Aliveness Is Asking of Me Now
I began this experiment with a clear intention: to understand aliveness as a lived, embodied experience and to take seriously the possibility that it could serve as an organizing principle for life. But this wasn’t happening in a vacuum. It was unfolding in the wake of a divorce after twenty-five years, estrangement from my daughter, and a return to Michigan—a place that is familiar but no longer feels like home. I’ve been trying to rebuild something, though I haven’t been entirely sure what. The “aliveness experiment” was, in part, a way of orienting myself in that uncertainty.
Very quickly, I encountered what I think of as a growth edge—an uncomfortable tension—between experience and explanation. My Manifesto for 2026 declared that I would participate in aliveness however it emerged, that I trusted the process, that I didn’t need to know what I was doing before I began. In reality, I felt a strong pull to define aliveness, structure it, and make it legible—through frameworks, research questions, and careful articulation. As a social scientist, this is what I know how to do. It’s how I’ve made sense of the world, how I’ve found legitimacy and belonging. But I began to see that this impulse, while familiar and even skillful, often interrupted or forestalled the very thing I was trying to access. It turns out that while I excel at taking fieldnotes in ethnographic research (which is all about participant-observation), I was at a loss when it came to trying to articulate my own lived experience.
Over time, a shift has emerged: letting experience come first, and allowing understanding to follow later, if at all. Aliveness is becoming something I participate in long before I try to describe it. This sounds simple, but it is not easy. It requires a kind of trust that I don’t yet fully have—trust in something that doesn’t come with external validation or clear outcomes.
A second growth edge has manifested around structure and control. During one particularly vexing week, I noticed how quickly I reached for organization—not just as a practical tool, but as a way to manage the anxiety that comes from uncertainty. Planning, categorizing, clarifying—it all gave me a sense of grounding. At the same time, I realized that my need to organize could also become a substitute for contact. I began to recognize this as more than a personal habit; it is patterned, reinforced by society’s broader logics of productivity, legitimacy, and control. The growth here has been in learning to differentiate: structure can support aliveness when it creates a frame for experience, but it can also dominate and suppress it. I’m certainly not advocating for doing away with structure. My challenge is to stay in relationship with it—to notice when I’m using it to avoid something more immediate and less certain and to practice finding the right amount of structure to let aliveness breathe.
A third tension I’ve experienced relates to intensity versus balance. There was a period early on where I was trying to increase aliveness—to seek out experiences that felt energizing, generative, and meaningful in a variety of contexts. Some of that was real and beautiful: dancing, music, moments of connection, creative expression. But over time, I began to feel the limits of that orientation. Aliveness is not something to maximize. It comes in different forms, and each has its own role: nourishing, enlivening, and contributing. Too much of any one form—especially without awareness—can lead to overwhelm, depletion, or a kind of subtle disconnection.
As a result of this tension, I’ve added “connected presence” as a core aspect of aliveness: not just feeling alive (which I originally defined as felt vitality, emotional range, directional desire, and deep satisfaction), but being attuned—to myself, to others, to my environment. This reflects the shift from amplification to modulation. Not “how do I feel more?” but “what is needed now?” and “what can I actually hold?” This is still something I’m learning—while I’m fairly good at tuning in to others and my surroundings, I’m just starting to identify and trust what is happening internally and to respond appropriately.
The growth edge that has been the most confronting is this: aliveness does not always feel good. In fact, for me, part of becoming more alive has meant widening my emotional range—staying present with grief, anger, discomfort. These are feelings that are typically not welcome in our society, so the tendency is to escape them as quickly as possible. In these last months, there have been moments where I’ve felt the weight of loss very directly—not just the past, but the present: the life I no longer have, the relationships that are strained or missing, the uncertainty of what comes next. There is a kind of rawness in that. But it feels different from numbness. It feels like contact. Even the discomfort that comes with growth edges—I know it’s part of the process, so I try to sit with it. But it’s hard.
And still—there are moments when I question all of this.
When I step back and look at my days, I sometimes think: what is the point? What do I have to show for this? Has anything actually changed? I can feel more, yes. I can name more. But I am still here—still without a clear direction, still without the kind of community or shared life that I know I want. There are moments when the whole thing feels self-referential, even indulgent. Like I’ve created a compelling frame for something that may not matter beyond me. I don’t completely believe that, but I can’t ignore that the thought arises.
One critical growth edge has emerged more clearly as the quarter progressed: the tension of aliveness in relationship. I began to notice how my sense of presence, vitality, and clarity shifts in contact with others—sometimes amplified, but often harder to access. I can feel more grounded and connected on my own, and then find that slipping when I’m with another person, in a group, or part of a crowd. My energy diffuses. I lose the thread. Or I adapt in subtle ways that pull me away from what I actually feel.
This has been particularly challenging because it touches something deeper: I don’t want to do this alone. At the most basic level, all I want from life is to love and be loved. I want to feel met, to share something real with other people, to build a life that is not just internally meaningful but relationally dynamic and expansive. And yet, I find it difficult to bring what I am experiencing into relationship. I hesitate. I edit. I stay quiet. Or I over-explain. There is a gap between what I feel, what I want, and what I share, and that gap feels important.
This is where the experiment has started to get real for me. Because aliveness, as I’m experiencing it, is not self-contained. It carries an impulse toward expression, toward connection, toward being witnessed. And at the same time, being in relationship introduces complexity. My experience is influenced, shaped, sometimes diluted when interacting with others. My challenge is to learn how to stay in contact with myself while also being open to others—to neither withdraw nor lose myself. This feels like an edge with real stakes going forward.
And then there is the question of contribution, a necessary growth edge for my own sense of aliveness.
Earlier in the experiment, I was focused on reconnecting with aliveness—recognizing it, naming it, allowing it. But increasingly, that has begun to feel incomplete. For me, aliveness that does not move outward—into relationship, into contribution—does not fully satisfy. I find myself wanting what I am experiencing to matter beyond my own life. To be part of something. To contribute to something real.
At the same time, I don’t yet know what that looks like. I can feel the impulse, but not the form. And there is a risk here, too—of collapsing back into performance, productivity, or trying to make something legible before it is ready. So this remains open and somewhat uncomfortable.
Now, at the threshold of the second quarter, my orientation is both simpler and more demanding. I am less interested in capturing, analyzing, and defining aliveness and more interested in living in relationship with it—especially in the context of real life, real people, and real contribution. The questions I am carrying forward are:
How do I stay in contact with aliveness—not just in moments of solitude, but in the flow of daily life?
How do I remain connected to myself while also being open to others?
Where am I actually met, and how do I move closer to that?
And what does aliveness want to create or contribute—not in theory, but in concrete, shared ways?
Alongside all of this, there is something else I am beginning to recognize subtly—something that feels less like a growth edge and more like a quiet foundation. I am beginning to understand aliveness as a form of knowing. Not intellectual, not analytical, but felt. A sense of what is true, what matters, what is aligned or not. It is not always clear or stable, and I don’t yet fully trust it—especially in more complex or relational situations. But it is there. And I am learning, slowly and somewhat awkwardly, to orient toward it.
In some ways, this may be the most important shift of all. Because if I can stay in relationship with this knowing—if I can learn to recognize it, trust it, and act from it—then the rest begins to organize itself from the inside out. Not perfectly, not all at once, but differently than before.
This next phase feels less like an experiment in the abstract and more like a return to life. It will require more than attention. It will require participation—with people, with places, with forms of work that matter beyond me. Honestly, that’s a little scary. But I know it’s worth it.
I don’t feel resolved. I don’t feel certain. But I feel something I trust a little more than before—a way of knowing that seems to move toward connection.
And I am beginning to follow it, into a life that has to be shared.
