After so long

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

The prompt asks, What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?

My answer is inconvenient.

It is now.

I could choose something more dramatic. I have stood on mountains and watched the world disappear beneath the clouds. I have crossed oceans. I have travelled to places I once knew only from maps. I have worked on the Atlantic when the sea was angry enough that one stupid mistake could have consequences measured in lives rather than inconvenience. There have been births and deaths, successes and spectacular failures. I have built things. Lost things. Loved people. Buried people.

There are plenty of moments when my heart was pounding.

But being alive and feeling alive are not quite the same thing.

For a long time, I think I was extraordinarily good at surviving.

There is a competence to survival. You wake up. You work. You solve the problem immediately in front of you. You make plans. You laugh at inappropriate things. You help other people with their problems. You put one foot in front of the other often enough that eventually everyone—including you—assumes you’re fine.

And somewhere in all of that, you can forget that life is supposed to contain more than endurance.

Then something changes.

Sometimes there isn’t even a great cinematic moment marking it. No orchestra begins playing. No narrator announces that the second act has arrived. You simply notice one morning that you’re looking forward to tomorrow.

That has been happening to me lately.

I’m writing again—not merely because I am a writer and therefore ought to write, but because there are things inside me demanding words. Music sounds different. Ireland looks different. I find myself noticing ridiculous little things again: light on the water, an unexpected kindness, a conversation I don’t want to end. I am laughing more. Wondering more. Hoping more.

And hope, I’ve discovered, is terrifying.

Despair asks remarkably little of us. Hope makes demands. It asks us to imagine a future and therefore gives us something we might lose. It asks us to loosen our grip on the certainties we constructed to protect ourselves. Sometimes it even asks us to reconsider conclusions we had long ago declared final.

That might be what feeling alive actually is.

Not happiness. Certainly not the absence of pain. It is vulnerability to the whole damned thing.

Joy and fear. Curiosity and uncertainty. Desire and restraint. The sudden realization that there are still roads you want to walk simply because you don’t know where they lead.

After everything, some stubborn part of me remains capable of wonder.

Capable of being surprised.

Capable, apparently, of hope.

So I can’t give the prompt a single moment from years ago and tell you, There. That was when I felt truly alive.

I can give you this one.

Now.

After so long, I feel alive again.