This week, I’ve been sharing five essays drawn from my new book, .
The first three installments explored how we become absent from lives that appear to be working: examined the distance between functioning and inhabiting;
These questions have accompanied the evolution of my work for years. Writing about life after religion brought me into contact with difficulties that extended well beyond the loss of faith. People were struggling to trust their judgment, inhabit their relationships, and find their footing after an inherited account of life no longer held. I began developing the language of existential health to address our relationship with meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, and the responsibility of living a life no one else is able to live for us.
That pioneering work has since taken several forms, including the publication of the ** first peer-reviewed paper** devoted to existential health as a field, the creation of the
The Practice of Being Alive grows from that same work, with a more personal invitation at its center. I wanted to write a book that brings intellectual clarity into contact with the experience of being a person: loving people we will lose, making choices we cannot fully justify in advance, and discovering how much of ourselves we have withheld while waiting to feel ready. This fourth installment begins with a demand I carried long after leaving religion—the expectation that I needed to know what I believed before I could trust myself to live.
You move on with your life while waiting for permission to live it. You have left the church, ended the relationship, or accepted that the future you organized your life around is no longer coming. You make practical adjustments and explain the changes to people who ask. Yet somewhere beneath that activity, you are waiting to feel certain enough to belong to your life again.
For those leaving religion, the waiting often takes the form of a search for something else to believe. The old account of reality no longer holds, but its absence feels like unfinished business. You assume that a coherent life requires a coherent answer, and until a new one arrives, whatever you are living feels provisional.
I know that territory. Leaving Christianity involved more than reconsidering doctrines I had once taught. It unsettled the relationship between knowing what I believed and knowing how to live. Having spent years inside a world that supplied answers to the largest human questions, I had difficulty recognizing a life without those answers as a life with its own integrity.
What took longer to question was the assumption beneath the search: that I needed to settle the meaning of existence before participating fully in it. I had stopped believing the old answers while continuing to grant the demand for an answer authority over my life.
A system of belief does more than tell us what is true. It teaches us what conditions must be met before we are allowed to feel safe, make a commitment, or trust ourselves. Even after we reject its conclusions, those conditions often remain in place.
Someone leaves a religious community and spends years looking for a worldview that will finally withstand every objection. The content of the search changes dramatically, but the terms remain familiar. Somewhere there must be an account of reality secure enough to remove the risk of living.
I understand the appeal. Certainty promises relief from having to make consequential choices with incomplete knowledge. If the right framework establishes what everything means, our task becomes following it correctly. The burden of authorship seems to pass from our fallible judgment to something beyond us.
But certainty also establishes a hierarchy in which explanation outranks experience. A moment of affection becomes more trustworthy once we know where love fits into our philosophy. An impulse toward generosity needs an approved account of morality. We begin to treat what happens between us and the world as insufficient until a larger system certifies it.
There is intellectual work worth doing after inherited beliefs collapse. Some claims deserve rejection, others deserve closer examination, and our understanding benefits from serious thought. The difficulty arises when inquiry becomes an indefinite condition of entry into the life doing the inquiring. Thought then keeps extending a permission it never quite grants.
It would be too easy to tell people to embrace uncertainty without acknowledging what certainty once held together. Religious belief often arrives woven into family affection, moral identity, community, and the expectation that suffering will eventually make sense. Its collapse leaves practical and emotional losses that an argument about intellectual freedom does little to address.
A person grieving the loss of heaven is also grieving a particular relationship to the dead. Someone who no longer believes in divine guidance has lost a familiar way of carrying responsibility. Sunday morning might become an empty space where friendship, music, ritual, and a sense of being located in the world once existed.
These losses require attention. Calling them liberation does not make them stop hurting, and replacing them with a new philosophy does not automatically restore what disappeared. Much of the work involves discovering what the old structure provided and finding honest ways to care for those needs.
Yet grief easily becomes entangled with a different judgment: that without the structure, life itself has become unavailable. We feel the absence of an explanation and conclude that meaning has vanished with it. The loss spreads beyond what has actually been lost.
A shared meal still nourishes a friendship, even when neither person knows whether the universe has a purpose. The death of someone we love still calls for tenderness toward those left behind. These experiences do not resolve the questions that trouble us, but they reveal how much of life remains available while the questions remain open.
In Chapter 15 of The Practice of Being Alive, “After Belief, Before Trust,” I write:
“Because the trust I mean is not belief restored. It isn’t a conviction about how reality is arranged or how your story ends. It’s smaller and harder than that, and also more durable. It’s a willingness to keep showing up for a life that has made you no promises.”
The word trust needs care here because it is so often used to smuggle reassurance back into the conversation. “Trust life” sounds comforting until someone asks what, exactly, life has promised to do. People suffer undeservedly, relationships end despite sincere effort, and courage does not reliably produce the outcome it deserves.
I have no interest in asking someone to call those realities benevolent. Trust that depends on believing everything will work out remains vulnerable to the next event that does not. It also places an unfair burden on suffering people to discover the hidden goodness in what has happened to them.
The trust I am describing concerns our willingness to participate without knowing in advance whether participation will protect us from regret. A friendship develops through encounters whose meaning neither person fully controls. Creative work begins before its worth has been established. A decision becomes ours through taking responsibility for it, including the possibility that we will need to reconsider.
Such trust leaves room for discernment. We assess evidence, notice patterns, establish boundaries, and revise our judgments. Someone rebuilding after betrayal has good reason to move carefully. Living without guarantees does not require ignoring the information experience has given us.
What changes is the demand we place on that information. Evidence helps us judge whether a step is worth taking; it cannot remove every possibility of loss. At some point, even a thoughtful decision requires entering a future that has not agreed to our terms.
My work in existential health returns repeatedly to the question of how people sustain a livable relationship with the conditions of being human. Those conditions include uncertainty, dependence, mortality, and the responsibility of making choices whose consequences we cannot fully foresee. No worldview exempts its adherents from them.
We often judge our inner lives by how successfully we have quieted these difficulties. A person with settled convictions appears grounded, while someone living with unresolved questions appears lost. But the appearance tells us little about how either person encounters experience. A firm belief sometimes supports a generous life; it sometimes prevents reality from getting through.
Likewise, uncertainty has no automatic virtue. It becomes exhausting when every decision reopens the entire question of who we are and what anything means. People need enough continuity to act, enough belonging to risk honesty, and enough confidence in their judgment to make a choice without conducting a trial of their whole existence.
Existential health involves developing that capacity while remaining answerable to reality. We learn to make commitments proportionate to what we know. We discover that revising a judgment need not destroy self-trust, because self-trust includes the willingness to recognize an error. Our footing comes partly from how we respond when the ground shifts.
Consider someone whose marriage has ended. They are unlikely to know what their future will look like, whether they will love again, or how this loss will eventually enter the story of their life. None of those questions needs to be settled before they begin rebuilding an ordinary day that contains nourishment, companionship, and something worth attending to.
Those actions will not supply a final interpretation of the divorce. They do something more immediate: restore a relationship with the life that is still happening. Over time, the person discovers evidence of their ability to live through what they could not have explained their way around.
One of the hardest things for me to relinquish was the hope that sufficient understanding would eventually make living feel secure. I had invested so much in explanation that I kept expecting it to deliver something explanation does not possess. However carefully I thought, the future remained open.
In the book, I describe the negotiation I was attempting: “I wanted assurance before I’d take part, clarity before I’d commit, certainty before I’d trust. Reality offered none of these.” I was asking thought to secure the conditions under which I would finally allow myself to live.
Recognizing this did not end my questions. It changed their place in my life. I became more interested in whether my way of holding a question deepened my contact with experience or kept postponing it. Some questions opened the world; others had become familiar places to retreat from its demands.
That is part of what I hope The Practice of Being Alive offers: an exploration of how we inhabit a life whose largest questions remain unresolved. The movement from observation into participation runs through the book because understanding our absence is only the beginning. We still have to discover what arriving asks of us.
For someone reading this today, arrival might involve allowing a conversation to matter without deciding what it means for the rest of your life. It might mean beginning work you care about while your confidence remains uneven. The significance lies in giving some part of your attention and affection to what is here.
You do not have to force a new conviction into the space an old one left behind. There is room to grieve, to think, and to remain unsure while becoming more involved in your days. The life you are waiting to qualify for is already making its demands on your care.
If you’d like to explore these questions with me, becoming a paid subscriber ($50 annually) also includes membership in the ** Center for Non-Religious Spirituality**. There, we bring existential health into daily life through reflection, conversation, and community.
I’m also offering a ** six-week online course** based on
