Alive Is Different From Comfortable

I have begun to wonder if some of us aren’t unhappy at all. We’re under-alive.

That is a strange distinction, but I can’t stop thinking about it. We know how to recognize misery. Something hurts, something is broken, something needs to change. Even when we don’t know how to fix it, suffering at least gives us a problem we can point toward. What I find much harder to understand is the vague restlessness that can exist inside a life that is basically okay.

Nothing is burning down. Nobody needs rescuing. You aren’t waking every morning desperate to escape. Maybe you even worked incredibly hard to create the stability you have now, and there are plenty of things in your life for which you are genuinely grateful. Yet every once in a while, something inside you whispers, Is this it? We tend to treat that question like ingratitude. I don’t think it always is.

Maybe there are seasons when the problem isn’t that our lives are bad. Maybe we’ve simply become too removed from the experience of being alive inside them. That possibility has been bothering me since Bali, not because Bali was some enchanted land where every moment was profound, but because so much of what made me feel alive there was inconvenient as hell.

We were tired. We got sweaty. Plans changed. Roads were ridiculous. There were stairs. So many fucking stairs. We woke up at 2:30 in the morning to ride a Jeep up Mount Batur, trekked through jungle, swam beneath waterfalls, ate food we couldn’t always identify, navigated unfamiliar customs and spent a ridiculous amount of time not knowing exactly what was going to happen next. Very little about any of it was efficient, and I felt incredibly alive.

That interests me more than whether I was relaxed.

Comfort and aliveness are not the same thing. Comfort removes friction, while aliveness often requires participation. Modern life has become extraordinarily good at removing friction, and most of us gladly participate in that project. Food arrives at the door. Groceries appear in the trunk. Entertainment waits in our pockets. Work can happen from the couch. Lights turn on with our voices. Algorithms decide what we might want to watch, buy, read and hear next. Artificial intelligence can increasingly write, plan, organize, summarize and create things that once required hours of our attention.

Much of that is wonderful. I have no desire to churn my own butter simply to prove I am human. But I do wonder what happens when convenience becomes one of the organizing principles of a life. We save ourselves the trip, the conversation, the waiting, the uncertainty, the effort, the awkwardness and the possibility of getting lost. Then, strangely, we begin searching for ways to feel something.

We scroll. We shop. We binge. We refresh. We consume stories about other people taking risks, falling in love, climbing mountains, renovating houses, traveling across countries, cooking beautiful meals, raising children, making art and doing outrageous things with their lives. I can watch someone swim beneath a waterfall while lying completely still in my bed, and my brain will receive stimulation without my life having experienced much of anything at all.

That distinction feels increasingly important to me.

Maybe human beings need some amount of friction. Not trauma. Not chaos. Not unnecessary suffering. I am not suggesting anyone deliberately make life harder because hardship builds character. I’ve had enough character-building experiences for several lifetimes, thank you very much. What I am talking about is participation, because there seems to be something deeply human about having to enter our own lives rather than merely consume them.

There is something different about cooking the meal instead of ordering it, walking through the neighborhood instead of watching another episode, calling the friend instead of liking her photograph, or putting your hands in dirt and making something that might turn out badly. The same is true of making love without mentally grading your body, sitting around a table long enough for the conversation to become interesting, getting on the plane, taking the class, dancing badly, or learning something you are not immediately good at. None of those things is revolutionary. Perhaps that is precisely the point.

Aliveness seems to require that we actually show up, and showing up contains risk. If I deeply love someone, I can lose them. If I make something, somebody can hate it. If I tell the truth, the conversation may become uncomfortable. If I ask for what I want, somebody might say no. If I travel somewhere unfamiliar, I may get lost. If I allow myself to want more from my life, I may have to confront the places where I have quietly settled.

Comfort has an understandable response to all of this: don’t disturb anything. Keep the routine. Protect what works. Avoid unnecessary complications. Aliveness, however, seems willing to say, Come anyway. Not because danger is desirable, but because a life stripped of every meaningful risk eventually asks very little of the person living it.

I think midlife makes this conversation particularly interesting. By fifty, many of us have spent decades trying to create stability. We wanted the home, the relationship, the career, the financial security, the routines and the people we could count on. After enough chaos, predictability can feel like holy ground, and I would never dismiss the beauty of finally reaching it.

Then something unexpected can happen. You get what you wanted, or at least enough of it, and another hunger appears. It isn’t necessarily a hunger for more things, more money or another accomplishment. It is a hunger for more life: more laughter that makes your stomach hurt, conversations that change you, sex where you’re actually in your body, dinners that last too long, beauty, friendship, prayer that isn’t squeezed between errands, and moments when you forget where your phone is.

Maybe this is why some people reach midlife and blow everything up. They mistake destruction for vitality. An affair feels alive. Spending recklessly feels alive. Leaving everything feels alive. Chaos produces sensation, and sensation can be intoxicating when you have been emotionally asleep. But blowing up your life and inhabiting your life are not the same thing.

There has to be another way to become alive without destroying everything that took years to build.

I keep thinking about Jesus saying that He came so we could have life and have it abundantly. We often hear abundance and imagine acquisition: more blessing, more resources, more opportunity, more evidence that life is going our way. I wonder whether abundance might sometimes mean depth instead. Perhaps it means becoming fully present for what is already here, willing to taste it, touch it, risk loving it and allow ourselves to be changed by it.

Maybe abundance is not having more life. Maybe it is becoming more available to the life you have.

That idea lands differently for me now. I don’t need another reinvention. I don’t need to manufacture chaos or spend the rest of my life chasing the emotional high of travel. Bali wasn’t valuable because it offered an escape from reality. It was valuable because it reminded me how deeply human it feels to participate in reality: walking, sweating, touching, praying, climbing, talking to strangers, getting lost, eating slowly, watching the sunrise, being inconvenienced and allowing myself to be surprised.

The challenge now isn’t figuring out how to stay there. It is figuring out what came alive in me there and refusing to put all of it back to sleep.

That may require much smaller changes than we imagine. Take a different road home. Sit outside after dinner. Invite people over before the house is clean. Touch your spouse when you pass in the kitchen. Go somewhere without researching every damn detail first. Turn off the television. Learn to paint. Join something. Plant something. Ask someone a question when you don’t already know what their answer will be. Aliveness does not require a passport nearly as often as it requires our presence.

Perhaps that is the piece I’ve been missing. I spent a lot of years thinking healing meant becoming safer inside my life, and in many ways it does. Safety matters. Stability matters. Peace matters enormously. But healing cannot only be about becoming less afraid; eventually, it also has to become about becoming more willing to live.

There is a difference between protecting the life you’ve built and actually inhabiting it. So I am paying attention now to what makes time disappear, what makes me curious, what makes me laugh too loudly, and what pulls me into my body instead of farther into my head. I want to notice what makes me reach for another person instead of another screen, what makes me forget to manage an experience while I’m having it, and what leaves me tired in that wonderful way that says I actually used the day I was given.

Those things feel like clues.

I don’t want to become increasingly efficient at moving through days I barely experience. I don’t want every inconvenience removed, every unknown answered before I encounter it, or comfort to become such an important value that anything unpredictable begins to feel like a threat. Most of all, I don’t want to spend the next thirty years watching other people live through a screen while congratulating myself for keeping my own life perfectly under control.

Maybe the question isn’t whether your life is comfortable. Maybe it isn’t even whether you’re happy. Every once in a while, perhaps we need to ask something more primitive than either of those questions: When was the last time you felt completely, unmistakably alive?

Then pay very close attention to the answer.

→So maybe this weekend, don’t ask yourself what needs fixing. Ask yourself something better: When was the last time I felt completely, unmistakably alive? Where were you? Who were you with? What were you doing? And what has quietly disappeared from your life since then?

Tell me in the comments. What makes you feel most alive? Not productive. Not successful. Not comfortable. Alive.

As always loving and praying for you and our world,

Rene Schooler

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This post was previously published on medium.com.