How often are you “awake”? How and when do you notice being alive?
In An American Childhood, Annie Dillard talks about her childhood discoveries of being awake, noticing that she is being alive and thrilled at these moments of knowing about being.
Who would ever tire of this heart stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be? It drives you to a life of concentration, it does, a life in which effort draws you down so very deep that when you surface you twist up exhilarated with yelp in a gasp.
Who could ever tire of this radiant transition, the surfacing to awareness and this deliberate plunge into oblivion – the theater curtain rising and falling? Who could tire of it when the sum of those moments at the edge – the conscious life we so dread losing – is all we have, the gift at the moment of opening it?
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, p. 17
What would life be like if you lived in greater, more consistent awareness of this precious aliveness? How would you approach your work life? Your personal life?