Sometimes, even breathing feels borrowed.
It doesn’t begin with a scream. It begins with the absence of one.
You wake up. You sit up. You scroll.
That’s not living. That’s continuing.
There are mornings that feel like someone else’s. Days that pass like background noise. You eat. You reply. You move. But something in you is paused. Still buffering.
This is the space between living and being.
You remember the first time you felt alive. Not happy. Not entertained. But alive. It might have been in a forest. At a concert. Holding someone’s trembling hand. Or maybe in the middle of a storm. The kind that makes the windows rattle and the power go out. The kind where silence becomes holy.
Why does aliveness visit us like weather? Unscheduled. Uncontrolled.
We design lives that are efficient. Comfortable. Predictable. But not porous. And without porousness, there is no wonder.
The Disappearance of Wonder
You start to notice the flattening. How delight gets replaced by productivity. How curiosity becomes replaced by tabs.
When did attention stop belonging to you?
There’s a way routine steals color. You don’t even notice it at first. But the world fades into greyscale. The meals blur. The conversations autopilot. The mirror becomes a checkpoint. You smile to prove you still can.
Living is not the same as managing. But we get medals for management. We get promotions for efficiency. We get likes for repetition.
Being is not rewarded. It’s often punished. It means stillness. Slowness. Questions. And questions break systems that depend on you staying quiet.
Sometimes, a forgotten object can bring us back to presence. A simple record player that spins silence into sound. A ritual disguised as music. Quietly available through this gentle return to listening.
Body Present, Spirit Deferred
You show up. You reply to messages. You finish tasks. You remember birthdays. And yet you feel behind on something that has no deadline.
Your body is a calendar. But your soul is unscheduled.
What happens when the soul’s requests go unanswered for too long?
A quiet collapse. Not visible. Not dramatic. But felt. In yawns that last too long. In tears that come without story. In laughter that sounds far away from your own mouth.
Existence becomes a job. One you didn’t apply for. One with no sick days.
You begin to shrink inside yourself. Smiling in meetings. Laughing at jokes. Checking boxes. But feeling like a shadow in your own outline.
The Metrics of Survival
We count steps. We count followers. We count unread emails. But we don’t count wonder. Or awe. Or the number of times you looked at the moon and actually noticed it.
There’s no KPI for tenderness.
So you keep performing aliveness. Until it becomes exhausting.
Somewhere, someone is dancing in their kitchen, barefoot, for no one. Somewhere, someone is painting a wall the wrong color just to see how it feels. Somewhere, someone is asking, sincerely, if this is it.
Those are the ones still living.
Not performing. Living.
What does it mean to exist in a world that rewards consistency more than vitality? Why is stillness mistaken for laziness? Why is delight seen as indulgent?
Maybe because we’ve forgotten that joy is not a distraction. It’s a signal. A compass. A flare from the soul.
Remembering the Pulse
The pulse of being can be faint. But it never leaves.
Sometimes it hides in music that breaks you. In smells from childhood. In the ache of a certain goodbye. In the laughter of someone who doesn’t know they’ve saved you just by existing.
Living is not a goal. It’s a return.
You come back to it in pieces. In sips. In stolen moments between obligations.
But the more you listen to what makes you feel more than functional, the more you expand the space of being.
You remember what it means to inhabit your own life.
Not just to move through it.
To feel it move through you.
The Risk of Feeling Again
The first step is small. Letting your eyes linger on a stranger’s joy. Letting music wreck you without skipping the track. Letting discomfort sit without silencing it.
It won’t always feel safe. But that’s the edge where existence folds back into life.
You may cry for no reason. Laugh mid-sentence. Take longer walks without a destination. These are not symptoms. These are signs.
You’re re-entering your life.
The quiet collapse doesn’t have to be permanent. Sometimes it’s the only way the soul can ask for renovation.
And maybe that’s the beginning.
Not of a louder life.
But a real one.
The kind that grows quietly. Slowly. Like something remembering the shape of sunlight after a long season underground.
One moment at a time.
The Imitation of Aliveness
There is a version of you that knows how to impress. That keeps the schedule. That answers the door with a smile and the phone with energy. That fills silences with anecdotes and never lets discomfort linger.
But beneath that version, something older waits. A self that doesn’t care how it looks. A self that only asks, is this mine?
It doesn’t want applause. It wants presence.
And you can still choose it.
Right now. Even here.
This is where the words end, but maybe not the listening. A quiet companion for these reflections lives in this analog escape, available through Amazon.
Thanks for reading . Written by Jon from ClickWorldDaily
I write stories for those who feel things deeply, but quietly.
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