So, in 2014 my word of the year was ‘yes’ and my word for this year, 2015, is….’alive’.
I want to make this year one where I am alive: where I feel alive, I do things that make me know I’m alive, I celebrate the fact that I’m alive and most importantly, I live.
This is particularly pertinent as I have been becoming more and more aware of the increase in daily life of the virtual and superficial over the real and meaningful. The constructed narratives we publish daily and at times hourly on social media are what we want people to know about us or what we want people to think our lives are like, but not necessarily who we really are and how we really live. I know that my often smug Facebook checkins or my supposed quick fire tweets (which can actually take a ridiculously long time to compose) can be just a glorified ‘affirm me and my amazing life’ shout out. It’s as if we spend so much time deciding and fashioning what our lives should look like, that we don’t actually live. I want to live, to be alive not just be a status or a tweet.
Being alive to me means being real, not virtual.
Being alive to me means really connecting, not just ‘liking’ or favouriting.
Eckhart Tolle writes that we should ‘live increasingly in the aliveness of present moment’. How can we do this if we are too focussed on recording the present moment in a selfie, a status update or a location check in?
And what if the aliveness of the present moment is something not worthy of such a status update? Being alive will inevitably also leave us gloriously open and vulnerable to good and bad experiences, emotions and other people.
Uh oh! – This doesn’t sound like something that can be controlled or tidied up in an edit. This doesn’t sound like something I’d want to share or post, with a cheeky but appropriate emoji. 😉
My absolute favourite, Jesus, said that ‘I have come to give you life and life in all its fullness’. This is what I believe and hope being alive is…the fullness of life. Not just the edited social media highlights but the 24 hours a day of life, filled and running over with experiences, art, joy, pain, fear, longing, friendship, food, holidays, play, work, solitude, laughter, hope, despair, love…
I will try to share my being alive with you all, I will continue to record my aliveness. But if I appear absent from social media at times, sorry about that, it’s only that I am planning on being a bit preoccupied with the fullness of living!
This Little Light of Mine 