I once built my life around answers I believed could hold it together. I studied theology, ** became a pastor**, and helped others make sense of their lives through a faith I trusted with my own. Eventually, I could no longer stand behind what I was teaching. Leaving meant losing much of the ground beneath my identity, and discovering how much I had expected certainty to do for me.
The questions followed me out. People I loved could still die. Decisions still had to be made without knowing where they would lead. I could change my beliefs, but I could not think my way beyond the vulnerability of having a life.
In , I reflected on what thirty years taught me about deconstruction, reconstruction, and reality. Leaving gave me freedom to reconsider what I believed, but it also exposed how much I had relied on those beliefs to feel secure. The longer work involved learning to meet experiences that no new worldview would place beyond reach.
For a long time, I kept looking for firmer ground: a better explanation, a more coherent worldview, something I could finally trust without reservation. Eventually, I began to see how easily the search for ground can become another way of postponing life. How much certainty would be enough? What would have to be settled before I could give myself fully to being here?
Those questions brought me to the work I now call existential health: our relationship with being alive amid conditions no one can eliminate. Loving someone means risking loss, and choosing means proceeding without guarantees. Finding meaning asks something different of us than requiring life to resolve into a final answer.
The Practice of Being Alive: Modern Humans in Search of Ground grew from that work, and from conversations with people trying to find their way through lives they could neither fully explain nor control. With its release approaching, I want to share the question that runs through its pages:
How much of our lives can we inhabit while so much remains unsettled?
It is possible to become very good at managing a life you scarcely feel yourself inhabiting.
You meet your responsibilities. Answer the messages. Keep the calendar moving. Try to be a decent person. From the outside, much of it may look fine. Yet you feel strangely absent from your own days, as though the life you are arranging belongs to someone you have not quite become.
Sometimes the reasons for waiting are clear: greater financial stability, a less demanding season, relief from grief, or clarity about a relationship. These needs are real, and some circumstances genuinely restrict the possibilities available to a person.
But waiting can also become a way of relating to existence. Certainty becomes a prerequisite for choosing, confidence for speaking honestly, healing for accepting love. Somewhere ahead, we imagine, lies a version of life that finally feels safe enough to enter.
Even when something improves, another condition takes its place. There is always something left to secure.
In , I explored the possibility that the life already happening deserves attention before it becomes the life imagined. An ordinary afternoon is easily dismissed as an interval between more significant events. Yet treating the present as preparation turns postponement into a habit, even when there is something here worth entering.
I have come to wonder how much of our exhaustion comes from asking life to become something it cannot become before we allow ourselves to participate in it.
Much of my work in existential health begins with ** six realities no human life escapes**: mortality, uncertainty, suffering, isolation, the search for meaning, and insatiability—the longing that returns even after getting what seemed certain to satisfy it. These realities shape every life, including the ones that appear to have everything figured out.
They emerge in ordinary circumstances. Parents grow older, a medical appointment changes what feels dependable, and another year passes with long-held intentions still unfulfilled. Decisions carry consequences no one can fully foresee. Pain arrives uninvited, and understanding its cause does not necessarily make it hurt less.
Even in a loving relationship, conveying what it feels like to be oneself is difficult. The desire to be known completely meets the limits of what another person is able to understand or share. Work, beliefs, and roles that once gave the days direction begin to feel hollow. A milestone reached after years of effort brings satisfaction, only for the familiar longing to return before the celebration is over.
People encounter these conditions with different resources and burdens, and those differences profoundly affect what living requires. Yet no amount of preparation or privilege places a life entirely beyond their reach.
What interests me is how a person’s relationship with these realities shapes the possibilities of daily life. When choosing requires certainty, decisions remain suspended. The effort to prevent loss leaves less room for love, while the pursuit of lasting satisfaction draws attention away from what is already here. In trying to escape being human, a person risks losing touch with the very life they hoped to protect.
Existential health concerns our relationship with being alive, including the conditions we cannot eliminate.
The question named in extends beyond any individual loss of belief: what happens when reality, authority, and meaning themselves become difficult to trust? Under those conditions, an invitation to participate in life asks a great deal. It requires discernment about what deserves confidence and opportunities to experience connection without surrendering judgment.
That relationship takes shape in ordinary moments. Fear is still present when we make a considered decision. Letting someone know us means resisting the impulse to edit ourselves for approval. Grief needs room, alongside care for the people and possibilities that remain. Something worth doing today can give us direction while the larger questions of our existence remain unresolved.
The question behind is whether treating existence as a problem to solve makes it harder to inhabit. A difficult decision needs thought, and a harmful situation requires a response. But requiring an explanation for an entire life places a different burden on understanding: it must somehow settle everything before living feels permissible.
I think of this as developing capacity: our ability to hold the realities of life while continuing to participate in it. A person can accomplish a great deal yet struggle to bear disappointment, risk vulnerability, or live with uncertainty. Knowing how to keep life running does not necessarily mean feeling at home within it.
My work increasingly centers on the distance between understanding an idea and being able to live it. Convictions about compassion are tested in the treatment of oneself when things fall apart. A longing to belong raises the question of whether there is room to be seen honestly, without having to hide the parts that feel difficult to reveal.
There is no final state of immunity to being human. The possibility is to develop ways of meeting that humanity with greater honesty, care, and courage.
** This book grew** from the questions I have carried through my own life and the questions that keep returning in conversations with others.
Today, October 9, marks nineteen years since Wanda, my friend and Waffle House waitress, died. Our friendship began at a counter in Hermitage, Tennessee, during a time when I was trying to find my footing after leaving ministry. She once told me about attending church in her work uniform and leaving feeling that she was beneath the people sitting beside her. Knowing Wanda brought me face to face with judgments in myself that theological education and ministry success had left untouched.
Wanda came to mind as I wrote this book. She helped me understand that the practice of being alive includes how we see the people before us, and whether they feel welcome or diminished in our presence. Every year on this date, I remember her and ask whether the way I treat people carries forward what our friendship taught me. That question belongs beneath everything I write about meaning, belonging, and being human.
Many of you have also helped shape this book through the experiences you have shared in this newsletter community. You have shared what happens when inherited answers fail, when success feels strangely empty, when grief changes your world, or when you begin trusting a life that no longer comes with a map. Your willingness to speak honestly has helped keep my work close to lived experience.
The Practice of Being Alive brings these concerns into a sustained exploration of how we find ground in modern life. It asks what helps us participate more fully when certainty is unavailable, belonging feels precarious, and the future cannot be secured.
The word practice matters to me. Insight can open a door, but its implications unfold in an avoided conversation, a boundary that needs to be established, or an afternoon spent with someone beloved. Understanding takes root through the choices and encounters of daily life.
The book is currently available for ** Kindle preorder**, with the paperback available October 13. You can explore the book and find purchasing options on
If these questions have been following you, I hope you will read it. Take your time with it. Write in the margins. Notice where your own experience complicates what I have written. I want the book to deepen your relationship with your life, including your trust in what you discover for yourself.
I cannot offer you a life beyond uncertainty, loss, or longing. Writing this book has not given me one either. What I hope to offer is language that helps you recognize your experience, questions that bring you closer to what matters, and practices that support a more trusting relationship with being alive.
The phrase names something I am still learning to practice: participating without assurance that everything will turn out well. Such trust leaves room for discernment, boundaries, and grief. It takes shape in the willingness to care for someone, make a considered choice, or begin meaningful work while the outcome remains beyond control.
In yesterday’s essay, , I explored the developmental work behind the ability to inhabit a life. Recognizing what needs to change does not automatically supply the capacity to change it. An honest conversation might require learning to name a feeling; establishing a boundary might begin with support for tolerating someone’s disapproval.
Choose one part of your life that has remained on hold, and ask what would make participation more possible. That might mean asking for help, setting aside time for neglected work, or telling someone a truth you have struggled to express. Give that step a place in the coming week. Some circumstances still need to change, but an unfinished life deserves more than indefinite postponement.
I keep returning to the ordinary encounters in which this becomes real: telling someone the truth, making a choice we cannot fully secure, noticing the person serving our breakfast. Wanda remains part of how I understand this work. Whatever we come to believe about life, there is still the question of how we will meet one another today.
For those who would like to explore these questions with me, the ** Center for Non-Religious Spirituality** will host a six-week online course based on
Live sessions meet Wednesdays at 6 p.m. Central, with recordings available. The course is $249; all Substack subscribers can enroll for $199 with the code ALIVE50 through October 25.
Explore the course and enroll here.
