The experience of being alive
I spent the last month traveling across the US, UK, Italy and Austria for some work and some play. I’m now back at my desk. A bit reluctantly, to be honest. Not that I don’t love what I do, but getting to be out in the world connecting with people in real time and in real life was such good medicine.
Not to mention eating all the food in Italy (insert drooling emoji here) and having days that were unplugged from technology and tuned into nature. I can’t tell you how much my soul needed that. (Though I suspect you can feel it in your own soul.)
The six months before leaving for this trip were FULL. And squeezed in around all of that fullness, I was trying to write a twenty minute TED-style talk for the Fifteen Seconds Festival in Graz that was last week.
I wrote, practiced and nearly memorized no less than eight iterations of the talk during that time.
WHY?!? Good question.
Because I knew what I wanted it to be about, and, more importantly, I knew what I wanted it to feel like—to me and to the audience—and I couldn’t quite get there.
It would sound good on paper, but feel too sped up or too boring to say.
It would be chock full of intelligent insights, but not feel heartfelt.
It would have funny stories, but be too much about me and not enough about the audience.
It would be too heady and not embodied, or too performative and not relational…
You get the point.
But for you to really get the point, you should know the title of the talk. What Thought You Here Won’t Get You There: When Smart Isn’t Enough.
It was about how relating is inherently embodied and how so few of us are doing it that way because we’re in our heads, or focused externally, or more interested in coming across a certain way rather than being authentically in, and connecting from, our own experience.
So now you can see wherein lied my challenge: I couldn’t talk about being embodied in a heady way, and I couldn’t espouse the importance of truly relating while performing. (I tell you, being an experiential educator will call you to the mat every damn time!)
One week before the talk, I woke up early to the full moon over the forest on the western coast of Italy. The air through the open, screenless window was the perfect temperature. The only sound was a chorus of birds from all across the canyon. And for the first time in a long while I felt profoundly in my body and connected to the world around me.
One of my favorite quotes of all time drifted into my head. It’s from the mythologist Joseph Campbell. It says:
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
And in that moment, I knew my talk—the one I had submitted the completed slide deck for and that I had fully memorized—wasn’t the talk I could feel good giving.
Because more than wanting to come across as smart, or land a big client or a book deal, or any of the things a big talk like that might garner, what I reallywanted was to have a good experience of me, and to give the people watching an experience of themselves being alive.
Because life is too short, and so many of us, so much of the time really are missing the experience of it.
With that, my talk wasn’t perfect, but I felt like me up there. And I did my best to give people some opportunities—and some skillsets—for getting to have a good experience of themselves. And that feels good.
I’m excited to share it with you when the recording becomes available!
But for now, I encourage you to take the next little bit of time to experience being alive.
Go outside and take a big gulp of air into your lungs. Go give your kid a hug. Take a fifteen minute break to kick your feet up and read a novel. Or at the very, very least, put your a hand on your chest and confirm to yourself that you’re present in your body in this world, if even for a few moments.
If you want more ideas for how to connect to yourself in real time that will help you to have an experience of being alive, check out my Linkedin Learning course about learning to regulate your nervous system.