Written and verified by the psychologist GetPersonalGrowth.
Last update: 15 November 2021
Expect less. Relax every other day and the other too. To dare. Seeking refuge in the small space of an embrace that makes us feel bigger. Run away from time to time. Get on that train we thought we lost. Rest. Daydreaming as if there is no tomorrow. The things that help you feel alive are priceless and bring happiness.
Living is not the same as feeling alive. It is not always easy to reach that near-perfect state in which all of our fibers awaken. In which the senses are refined and for a moment everything acquires meaning, importance and harmony. It is difficult to feel vital in a world that pushes us to assume a passive and dependent attitude.
Laughter is the sun that drives the winter away from the human face
-Victor Hugo-
Our reality is modified by the almost constant idea that we are missing something. Following it, we become consumers from birth, people anxious to obtain or possess what will help us fill our eternal feeling of emptiness. Because there will always be something to be desired: an object, a different job, a more affectionate companion, a journey… Things, dimensions, moods that could (perhaps) make us feel fulfilled.
We are like a triangular piece of a puzzle trying to fit into an oval shape. We are too focused on what surrounds us and we want to fit together for love or for strength, forgetting that happiness starts from a specific point. A place that is under the skin: ourselves. It is a microcosm that we often forget to nourish with the ingredient that makes you feel truly alive: passion.
To live means to commit
One of the biggest risks we can face is living in a perennial state of passivity. The one in which we let ourselves be led by the hand, carried away by stimuli and circumstances, limiting ourselves to exist, but not to feel. The one in which we dissolve in our obligations to the point that life itself becomes a duty. Hope leaves our horizon to give way to an aseptic and purposeless existence.
It must be understood deeply: to live means to commit oneself. It means taking risks, being courageous even if fear presses us and having not one, but dozens of resolutions with which to open your eyes in the morning. Sometimes, however - and this is our mistake - we choose the easier way: conformism. We are satisfied with what we have even if it fits tightly and does not make us happy. You know the saying: better a bird in a cage than a hundred in the air? However, if we open this cage we find nothing but feathers, only the sad taste of what seemed like a promise, but which is actually nothing. Just a dream, a false confidence.
The things that help you feel alive are not found along the path traced by others. Not even in the golden cages of our comfort zone. To experience the vitality and happiness that gives meaning to everything, you need passion. We must stop thinking with the if (if I had, if I were, if it were) to live in the here and now, concentrated in the present, masters of our steps, explorers of our reality, architects of our dreams.
The things that help you feel alive
Risk and fail. Try again once, ten times and in the end… reach the goal. A walk in the afternoon to give birth to new ideas. To play a sport. The satisfaction of a job well done. A hand that grabs us in time of need. A moment of solitude. The complicity of friends. A project to be carried out with the partner. Our interests and small pleasures. The laughter of a child. Close a phase and start another with more enthusiasm, with more fear, but also more strength ... The things that make us feel alive are fires that ignite our soul. They are the foundation of our being, the hope in our projects, the motivation and energy that helps us grow. Cultivating them is essential.
If this does not happen, our psychological fabric and our resistance capacity weaken and then we face the worst risk: the emptiness and the certainty that our existence is meaningless. Feeling emptiness is the opposite of feeling life; for this reason we have to protect ourselves from it, we have to fill every room, every corner of our mind with elements rich in meaning. This is what Viktor Frankl said, father of speech therapy and survivor of several concentration camps: our mission as human beings is the search for a purpose. Taking responsibility for ourselves helps us feel full, fulfilled and free.
Feeling alive really depends on a precious material: enthusiasm. Each of us should seek a purpose and have enough courage to shape it, to make it a reason for living, a passion that never gives up. Because as Helen Keller said, "Don't be content to crawl if you feel the urge to soar".
