How do we know we're alive?

Sometimes, when I'm least expecting it, I feel a sense for how much I love being alive. I can be doing anything. Anything from washing dishes, to staring out the window, to climbing a tree. I can be having the worst day of my life, and out of nowhere it just hits me. It's such a hard feeling to describe. I'm not sure if I should try, because it's something I've always only...felt. I don't think what I feel is really how much I love being alive. I worded that wrong. I think what I feel is just being alive.

We're all alive every second, but that doesn't mean we feel it all the time. People who eat chocolate every second forget to really appreciate how awesome it is. It's very much the same, in a way, with life. We get so used to being alive that we forget what it really feels like. Or maybe we just forget to notice.

That's true for me at least. I'm not saying I don't love my life, but I think I take it for granted sometimes. Maybe we can only really appreciate something once we've realized its been overlooked all this time.

At the same time, in those amazing moments when I'm filled completely with a sense of life, it's not a realization of how I've forgotten it. It's more like something I've always known is there, and whose constant, unspoken presence I find comfort in. Sometimes I'll turn and make sure it's still there, even though I already know it's never left. It's like the sun. When night falls, the earth turns its back on the day, but the Sun never leaves. It's always there, no matter what. Sometimes we're just not in a place where we can see it.

That feeling I get, the sudden awareness of the fact that I'm alive, feels like the sunrise. It feels like when I'm trying so hard to remember the word for something, something stupid that I know I know, but it stays out of reach. It feels like being on the verge of...anything.

Being alive feels like the split second of silence that comes right before the hardest I've ever laughed. It feels like the times I've been asked questions I don't know the answers to. It feels like always knowing exactly why my best friend is calling me when I haven't reached the phone yet, or even seen who's on the other line. It feels like the deafening quiet that fills my mind when I read the last page of a book, unsure of how I should react. It feels like being so excited to wake up the next morning that I can't fall asleep for hours.

Being alive feels like every time I've told the truth when it was harder than anything else I've ever done. Being alive feels like the first time I heard my favorite song. It feels like those songs that play in the background across so many different stages of being. It feels like breathing in the smell of Fall when it first arrives. It feels like the times when I was seven years old and looked out my bedroom window, only to see a new world created by snow, shocked. It feels like ten years later when the same scene makes me feel seven years old again, finding my old innocence buried beneath new snowflakes.

Being alive feels like I'm breathing and holding my breath at the same time. It feels like I'm floating away but also sitting on the earth below, content to be grounded. Being alive feels like this one feeling I get all the time now, but didn't used to. It feels like being so young, so ignorant, so brand new, but also so old, so wary, and a part of something completely familiar.

But when I feel alive, I'm not actually doing any of those things. I just feel them all at the same time, along with hundreds, thousands of others. When I realize I'm alive, it usually finds me when I'm sitting down or standing still. Or when I've been running long enough that everything around me has frozen in time. It finds me when I've put my surroundings on pause, just to breathe. It finds me when I take a break from moving too fast.

The simplest way I can describe feeling alive is through happiness. I'm pretty sure being alive and being happy are one in the same. When I get caught up in either one, I always feel like I'm grasping for words that I just can't reach. I've learned that if I stop trying so hard and just sit back, immersed in life, immersed in happiness, the right words will come to me in the end. They tell me that everything is going to be alright.

And that's when I feel alive. When my mind is clear of every thought, I'm left with what always lives in the back of my mind. It's not a thought. I have too many thoughts, just like everyone else. But when my mind is clear of every thought, I'm left with the only truth I've ever held onto. I tell myself that everything is going to be alright. And that's when I feel happiness, because I never can come up with a legitimate reason not to. I don't need to think of a reason, not when there's already something I just know to be true. Everything is going to be alright.

That's really all that it means to be alive, at least, that's what it means to me.