Recently, I had an experience that reminded me of the power of sheer, unbridled aliveness. If you’re not sure what I mean, I’m talking about the sense of aliveness you feel coming from very young children. Most of us would likely say the sense of aliveness we experience is, at best, a diluted version of what we felt as children.
I was walking from the parking lot of a grocery store to the store entrance when a young boy of about six ran out from between two cars and made instant, complete eye contact with me. It was the kind of eye contact young children make with one another and, in an instant, decide you are their friend.
“Hi! My name is Oliver” was how he greeted me. I’m thrilled when a child meets a stranger and is “other-curious” instead of “other-cautious,” the way most kids have been taught to be. I said, with the same enthusiasm I felt from him, “Hi Oliver! What a fabulous name.” His reply granted me entrance into the unlimited world of his imagination: “Yah, that’s because I came from an olive tree.”
Like children who have been encouraged to show their aliveness (or, more correctly, like children who haven’t been treated in a way that shuts them down emotionally), his was as bright as the sun.
By the time he said this, his mother had appeared, and I saw the love with which she looked at her boy, which made me say, “I think you know how lucky you are to have a child who’s that alive.” She did.
If you contrast that unchecked, uncensored aliveness I’ve just described with your own, it may make you wonder what’s happened to the child-like feeling of aliveness you may have had when you were young. It’s tempting to think that life has drained that aliveness from you. It hasn’t. It’s still there, whether or not you can feel it right now, whether or not you can even remember the last time you felt it.
There’s only one thing that can make that sense of aliveness fade or seem to go missing: believing thoughts about yourself that, though they may seem absolutely true, don’t contain an ounce of fundamental truth.
These thoughts, if left unexamined, are the only thing that can seem to steal away your feeling of aliveness. As we go through life and age, we accumulate countless variations of these untrue thoughts. The result is that the older someone is, the less likely they are to radiate sheer aliveness.
Occasionally, though, you’ve probably seen an older person who shines with undiminished aliveness, and it’s as delightful, maybe even more so, than seeing it from a child. If it were true that diminished aliveness is simply a product of age, there wouldn’t be any of these elderly outliers, the ones whose aliveness is breathtakingly undiminished. But they’re out there. Here’s the strange, wonderful truth. Your own aliveness is every bit as strong and unblemished as it was when you were born.
Because so much of what we believe about aging comes from a toxic blend of received wisdom and cultural assumptions, that aliveness becomes veiled from us.
And every time you believe some untrue thought about yourself, you’re unknowingly veiling your own aliveness, from yourself, and from the world.
If you’re interested in experiencing the sense of undiminished, shining aliveness at whatever stage of life you happen to be, there’s a very direct way to do that. Whenever you notice you’re feeling bad about yourself, remember that every feeling you have is simply a direct reflection of whatever you happen to be thinking.
So, a bad feeling is your signal that you’re caught up in some unproductive thinking. A shitty thought can only produce a shitty feeling. Here’s an important detail: you don’t need to change your thinking or try to make it go away. You only have to remember that thought is an ability; it is not a reality. In other words, just because you thought it doesn’t mean it’s true.
Unexamined thoughts that are assumed to be true are the single factor that veils that wonderful aliveness of yours. If you’re willing to take the time to question the truthfulness of your own thinking, your sense of aliveness will re-emerge. It never went anywhere. It was just covered over by the weight of all that untrue, unexamined thinking.
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