When You Finally Fall in Love With Being Alive

There is a strange thing that happens when you finally begin to love your life. You become aware that you could lose it.

For most of my life, death wasn't something I particularly feared. In fact, within my spiritual understanding of existence, I have always thought of death as returning home—to the Spirit World. I never felt particularly attached to the idea that this physical body was the entirety of who I was. If anything, I often felt more connected to spirit than to my physical existence. And then something changed.

I started wanting to be here.

Not intellectually.

Not because I thought I should be grateful for life.

I actually began to love being alive.

And suddenly, mortality became very different.

I’ve spent much of my life taking my body for granted—and, at times, being downright destructive toward it. But exercise itself has never been foreign to me. I’ve worked out my entire life. For 18 years, I was a personal trainer and aerobics instructor, so movement, strength, and fitness were already woven into who I was. I loved working out, and honestly, I needed it. But training for an athletic goal, accomplishment changed the experience entirely.

Preparing for the Camino de Santiago gave my workouts a purpose beyond simply staying fit. I wasn’t exercising because I thought I should. I was training because I had somewhere to go, miles to walk, hills to climb, and a body I was asking to carry me there.

I’m walking. I’m sweating. I’m getting stronger. I’m deliberately challenging myself. I’m training in Arizona heat that can reach well over 100 degrees. And something about having a goal has shifted my relationship with my body. I’m not just working it out anymore—I’m preparing it, listening to it, respecting its limits and simultaneously pushing those limits.

For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t asking,

What do I want my body to look like? 

I was asking,

What do I want my body to be capable of?

And that question changed everything.

That may sound ordinary to someone who has always been athletic or disciplined. For me, it isn't. I have always been an all-or-nothing person. When something captures my attention, I can become intensely passionate about it. But sustaining that interest has historically been much harder.

The Camino is different.

I'm committed.

And the strangest part?

I love the commitment.

The challenge doesn't disconnect me from myself.

It connects me more deeply to myself.

Every time I walk farther than I thought I could, something inside me says,

I can trust body.

I can trust myself. 

Every time I keep going when something is difficult,

I can tolerate discomfort. 

Every time I follow through,

I am becoming the person I've always wanted to be.

And perhaps most importantly:

I am discovering that person is already me.

Recently, something happened that made me laugh at the sheer existential absurdity of being human. I noticed some strange redness on my face and hand. Normally, I might not have thought much about it. But suddenly I found myself paying attention to my body in a way I hadn't before.

Why?

Because now I care.

I have something I don't want to lose. For much of my life, I didn't have a conscious fear of death. Now I'm realizing that perhaps I didn't fear death because I wasn't particularly attached to staying.

But now? I want more. I want more travel. I want more adventure. I want more experiences.

And suddenly my physical age enters the equation. Not because I'm old. Not because something is wrong. But because time has become tangible.

The moment you finally become fully willing to live, you become aware that you can't live forever.

That is existentialism at its finest. Within my spiritual framework, I believe we choose to incarnate from the Spirit World. Perhaps we come here knowing that physical life is temporary—but when we enter the body, we forget. And maybe that's intentional.

Because if we remembered everything, we could understand life without actually experiencing it. We wouldn't know what it feels like to have a body that gets tired. We wouldn't know longing. We wouldn't know grief. We wouldn't know desire. We wouldn't know the exquisite pleasure of walking from city to city with our own two feet. We wouldn't know what it feels like to suddenly look around and think,

Holy shit. I really love being here.

Maybe incarnation isn't about learning something we never knew. Maybe it's about embodying something we already knew as spirit. For a long time, I think I understood spirituality as moving beyond the physical. But now I'm beginning to see something different. Maybe the point isn't to escape embodiment.

Maybe the point is to become spirit embodied.

To experience what it means to have an eternal consciousness temporarily living through a very finite human body. And suddenly my body isn't an obstacle.

It's my partner.

It's my hiking companion.

It's my way of experiencing the world.

It's the breath in my lungs.

It's the life force of my heart.

And because it's temporary, it becomes precious.

This has also made me rethink the difference between pushing myself and listening to myself. Because I'm an all-or-nothing person, skipping a day of training can make restarting much harder.

My ego says, Don't stop. If you stop, you'll lose momentum. But something deeper now says,

I want to walk because

walking makes me feel alive.

Those two voices can produce the exact same behavior. I go for the walk either way. But internally, they're radically different experiences.

One says, I have to.

The other says, I get to.

And perhaps the goal isn't to stop pushing. It's to learn the difference between choosing discomfort and ignoring yourself.

Pushing can be: I am willing to do something difficult because it matters to me.

Forcing can be: I am willing to ignore myself because I need to prove something.

Those carry very different intentions.

The question becomes:

Can I challenge myself

without abandoning myself?

That may be one of the most important questions of my life. I used to think alignment might feel peaceful all the time. Now I'm realizing it can feel incredibly alive. My mind, body, and spirit feel more aligned than they ever have. And alignment doesn't mean I stop having passion. It means my passion has somewhere to go.

It doesn't mean I stop challenging myself. It means the challenge is chosen from love rather than self-rejection. It doesn't mean I stop listening to my body. It means I finally care enough to hear what it's saying...

Perhaps alignment isn't:

mind + body + spirit = comfort.

Perhaps it's:

Mind + body + spirit = coherence.

Everything moving in the same direction.

And then comes the hardest part.

What if I finally figure it out... and then it ends?

Maybe that's the question underneath all of this. Maybe that's why the medical warning signs suddenly seem more important. Maybe I'm not suddenly obsessed with death.

Maybe I've simply become deeply attached to life.

And that's okay.

I don't want to go home yet.

I want to stay here.

I want to walk. I want to explore. I want to love. I want to drink wine. I want to laugh. I want to see Ireland. I want to keep discovering who I am.

And someday, if my spiritual beliefs are correct, perhaps I will return home to the Spirit World and look back at this incarnation.

Maybe I won't think, I wish I'd lived forever.

Maybe I'll think:

I really lived that one.

Maybe we aren't here to defeat mortality.

Maybe we're here to inhabit life.

To experience a body. To love imperfectly. To become courageous. To lose. To heal. To laugh. To walk. To discover ourselves. To experience the exquisite tension between knowing that life is temporary and choosing to love it anyway.

Maybe soul growth isn't about becoming detached from life. Maybe sometimes soul growth is learning to love life completely while knowing you cannot keep it.

And perhaps that is the ultimate paradox:

We become fully willing to live only when we understand that we cannot live forever.

So I don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to outrun mortality. I want to walk with it. One foot in front of the other. And see what's around the next bend. Because maybe that's what it means to finally understand the gift of being here.

I am here.

And I choose to be here.