What I Am
Alive is the word I would call it. It's what we all are until we're not. We're on different linear spectrums of the concept: vertical and horizontal. Because on one end we're only fresh - fresh babies, in the sense of "dang that baby is fresh!", but we're without a single concept of selflessness. We are feeling it all in that first cry, that first breath. That first experience of constipation. Everything is new. Everything feels alive.
And so life happens. And we hit these milestones. And they're milestones not only because someone has labelled them as that but also because they carry with them that sense of new life. A refresher. A way in which we let the old self die to a newer sense of what it is we are.
And so many times we'll lie to ourselves - we'll say that a phase of us is not dying when it really is, or it really ought to. Because we are human. Because we are restricted to plodding along the horizontal, linear timeline of our lives just like any of us do - there is no sense of what the next moment will truly hold, and with whom our moment will intersect. It's soul developing, riveting, and scary as heck, and sometimes we deny, deny, deny rather than saying "alright - time for another chance to breathe."
But we cannot continue to fear change. We cannot fight it, because it fights back. But we can instead ride it to its next glorious moment. And we'll find that our lines sometimes will or will not at a later intersect with that moment of aliveness that we had a while back - but its strength, its glory, its honesty has intensified. The confirmation of its value is relayed to us when it is not us that continually gropes for it to come back or to nestle in with us.
When a sense, a feeling of being alive comes to us, it is because it is given to us. And we needn't do anything else than hold out our hands and humbly accept it. Than know that we are blessed each and every day with that first breath of life that perpetuates new moments of feeling alive. That it was not our achievement of tapping ourselves on the shoulder and saying "alright, time to get up." That moment when our eyes open and we're here to face another day says exactly that: that we're here to face another day - to stand face to face with it and be encouraged by that fact. To know that we're not yet done, that we still have a work to do - that is to be alive.
