Define Truly Alive

What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?

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When I see prompts like this I always wonder what type of response is expected. Is it the commonplace being dressed up as the significant or is it the extraordinary event? First, as the title suggests, the idea of being truly alive needs to be interrogated.

There is an element of bad social media hashtag to the phrase ‘truly alive’. It’s the type of thing an influencer, or would be influencer, reaches for to try to get attention and traction. Alive is a binary, you are or you aren’t. Yes, there are times when life is more interesting or more exciting, but to be ‘truly alive’ is essentially a meaningless piece of hyperbole. It could mean something that frightened you, overjoyed you or made you feel a sense of awe, but unless you were alive in the biological sense of that word you would have nothing to judge it against! It could be small moments that create core memories that stay with you for life, although like any other memories the way that we remember them will differ from anyone else involved. For this prompt, then, I would like to move away from ‘truly alive’ and the big social media events that I might post on Instagram and focus on those small moments. 

A human life is made up of experiences that inform and shape our characters. Your reaction to stimuli when you first meet them will, in many cases, determine your attitude to particular events or people every time you come across them subsequently. In this blog I have reflected on all manner of ideas, events and feelings and I think I have learnt quite a lot about myself through this reflection. My focus has always been a deep connection with a person, a group of people or an event. So, for example, I have a very close knit family and they are the centre of my life. Outside of them, I have few friends, partly through basic nature, partly through the force of circumstances, such as spending a significant time abroad, especially in my thirties, and in those far off analogue days losing touch with everyone and everything that made up my life prior to marriage and teaching English as a Foreign Language. I have a deep desire to fill my life with music, reading and writing, as hearing new songs, or very familiar ones, and learning new things keeps me young in mind if not in body. If I have to decide on times when life is most intense, it would probably be when I go to live music.

When I go to concerts I feel lifted by the presence of so many people there for the same reason I am. It’s great to go to see the acts of my childhood, but the real lift is often to be found when going to acts with a much younger audience. For example, taking my daughters to artists like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, My Chemical Romance and Lola Young. In order, 92000 people singing along with You Belong With Me, my favourite Taylor Swift song, seeing Sabrina Carpenter just before she went stratospheric thanks to the Eras Tour in what will have been her last medium sized venue tour, belting out MCR’s Teenagers like I didn’t have a care in the world at Wembley Stadium and similarly losing myself completely in Lola Young’s Not Like That Anymore.

I look at my life and certain events are more vivid in my memories than others. They may not be remembered at all by others who were there at the time, so does that mean that they are not particularly significant in the greater scheme of things? Perhaps. However, what is significant in one life can be just as individual as the person themselves. The small moments I reflected on in the first paragraph are the ones that tend to create the strongest neural pathways in your core memory system. Events from childhood we still remember years afterwards will often develop a greater significance later on than they had at the time purely because we remember them and therefore attach that greater significance to them. That doesn’t mean they weren’t important at the time, just that we have been reflecting on them for so long that they have reached a level where they define you as a person or determine your attitude to people, places and experiences. I don’t think any of them make you feel ‘truly alive’ but they are part of what makes life meaningful. A final small example I can offer is that nearly everyone can remember their first kiss even if the person that kiss was with was only in your life for a short time. Mine was with Michele at school when I was nine years old in our form room in St Andrew’s and although she was only at the school for two years her affection and friendship represents everything I experienced at that school. I wonder if she remembers it too?