Three Reasons to Fall in Love with Being Alive
1. The World’s Bounty
Step into any market and you’ll see it: the astonishing variety of human creation. Piles of spices, each with a history stretching back centuries. Tables of fruit — pineapples, mangos, apples, pears — each carrying the taste of a climate, a culture, a lineage of growers. Shelves filled with books that capture whole worlds in words. Music playing from a corner stall, a fusion of instruments that never existed together before humans invented them.
This is the bounty of being alive at this time, on this planet. We inherit not just survival skills, but a carnival of inventions, foods, technologies, and arts. Someone figured out how to ferment grapes into wine, someone else discovered how to blow glass into vessels, someone painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, someone wrote the Harry Potter series, someone designed the Mars rover.
It’s dizzying if you stop to think about it. You and I get to wander through this carnival — trying the food, listening to the music, downloading the apps, marveling at the sheer abundance of what humans have imagined.
Life is not just about enduring. It’s about tasting the incredible range of things our species has brought into being. To be alive is to have a backstage pass to the greatest show on Earth: the human experiment in beauty, creativity, and curiosity.
Reflection: What new invention, food, or art have you recently tried that reminded you how astonishing the human imagination is?
2. The Call to Adventure
There’s something in us that longs to wander. To climb mountains, sail seas, and step into places where everything feels fresh. Travel is not just leisure — it is an expression of our desire to expand the boundaries of what we know.
Think of the first time you stood at an ocean’s edge and realized how big the world was — and how thrilling it felt. Think of walking through a foreign city, the smells and sounds so different from home that your senses felt reborn. Think of hiking a trail where every turn revealed a new vista, each one urging you forward.
Adventure doesn’t have to mean passports or peril. It can be as simple as exploring a new park in your hometown, trying a new cuisine, or learning a skill that once felt intimidating. The spirit of adventure is about saying yes to life’s invitation: Come see more. Come taste more. Come discover what else is possible.
Our ancestors crossed deserts and oceans without knowing what lay ahead. We, too, have our frontiers — not only physical, but intellectual, artistic, relational. To live is to be called beyond the familiar. And answering that call fills us with wonder.
Reflection: Where in your own life are you feeling the pull of adventure — big or small — and how might you follow it?
3. Everyday Delights
Not all wonder comes in grand gestures. Much of it hides in the ordinary.
The steam curling from your morning coffee. The rhythm of footsteps on a walk. A child’s impromptu joke that makes the whole room laugh. The smell of rain on dry ground. The way your favorite song lifts you, no matter how many times you’ve heard it.
These everyday delights are easy to overlook because they are always with us. But if we lost them, we would ache for them. The truth is, they are as miraculous as any invention or adventure. They are the texture of our days, the threads that make life not just endurable but beautiful.
Practicing gratitude for these small wonders doesn’t make us naïve. It makes us sane. It reminds us that even when big problems loom, life is still giving us reasons to smile, savor, and stay.
Reflection: What small delight today could you pause to savor as if it were the first time you’d ever encountered it?
Closing Note
Life is not one thing. It is a bounty of human creation, a call to adventure, and a tapestry of everyday delights. To be alive is to have access to all of it — to wander the carnival, to answer the invitation, to taste the simple joys that thread through our days.
Not every day will feel grand. Some will feel heavy. But even then, the bounty, the adventures, and the delights are still here, waiting to be noticed.
To fall in love with life is not to deny its hardships. It is to revel in its spectacles and savor its details. It is to remember that being alive means we get to be part of the show — not just as spectators, but as participants, adding our own notes to the music of existence.
