With The Practice of Being Alive ** now available for preorder**, I’ve been thinking about where this book began. The
Revisiting my ** previous books**, I found questions, ideas, and intuitions I now recognize as early threads of Existential Health. I didn’t have that language then, but I was already wrestling with how we find meaning, trust ourselves, and build a life we can inhabit honestly.
So this week, alongside celebrating the new book, I'm going to revisit a few of those passages - not out of nostalgia, but to follow the trail of a question I've been pursuing for much of my life.
I recently came across something I wrote in ** Notes from (Over) the Edge**. The passage begins with two words:
“Meanwhile, you suffer.”
Not exactly an opening that says, “You’re going to love this book.”
I was trying to name something I had begun noticing in myself and in the people around me, something underneath the ordinary movement of our lives. We went to work, raised families, watched television, attended church, read books, followed the news, paid our bills, and tried to make something of ourselves. Yet beneath all that activity there seemed to be a persistent disturbance.
I called it a chronic discontent. A longing. A disharmony. Something was off, even when we could not say exactly what it was. The explanations we had been given did not quite correspond to the lives we were actually living.
I wrote about reading the latest spiritual book and feeling the temporary excitement of encountering a new idea. For a while, something opened. Life seemed different. Then the excitement faded, ordinary existence returned, and there it was again.
Reading those words now, I recognize what I was reaching toward. I did not have the language of Existential Health then. I was simply trying to understand why another answer never seemed to be enough.
For much of my life, I assumed that the deepest human problems were ultimately problems of belief. That made sense given the world in which I had been formed. I studied theology, became a pastor, preached sermons, taught scripture, and spent years inside a religious system built around answers to the largest questions human beings ask.
Who are we? Why are we here? What is wrong with us? What does God want? What makes a life meaningful? What happens when we die? Christianity did not merely offer opinions about these questions. It provided an architecture in which they could be answered and a life could be organized around those answers.
When that architecture began collapsing for me, I initially assumed that I needed better answers. Maybe I had inherited the wrong theology. Maybe Christianity needed to be reconstructed. Maybe spirituality needed to be separated from institutional religion. Maybe philosophy, psychology, mysticism, or some other tradition contained pieces I had been missing.
Much of that exploration mattered. I encountered ideas that changed me and relinquished beliefs that no longer seemed capable of surviving honest examination. My world became larger, and in many ways so did I.
Still, something kept bothering me. Another explanation was never quite enough.
That is what I hear now in those old words. I was beginning to suspect that the problem was not simply that human beings had been given the wrong explanations of existence. Maybe we had misunderstood what an explanation could do for us in the first place.
Human beings reach for explanations when life becomes difficult. Something happens and we want to know what it means. Someone dies and we ask why. A relationship ends and we reconstruct the story. A religious worldview collapses and almost immediately we begin searching for another way to organize reality.
There is nothing wrong with explanation. Some explanations are more truthful than others, and understanding can relieve unnecessary suffering. But an explanation of life and the capacity to inhabit a life are not the same thing.
An elaborate theology of suffering may still leave you unable to sit beside pain that has no satisfying explanation. A philosophy of mortality offers little protection from the terror of losing someone you love. And beautiful words about meaning can coexist with a strange absence from your own life.
It is possible to know a great deal about life without knowing how to live the life that is yours.
That distinction eventually became foundational to what I now call Existential Health. My focus shifted from supplying people with another worldview to cultivating the capacities that help us remain in relationship with reality when our worldview no longer protects us from it.
The question changed. Instead of asking only what explanation might make suffering, uncertainty, mortality, or meaninglessness disappear, I became interested in what allows us to remain fully alive when some of these realities cannot be made to disappear.
One sentence from that old passage has stayed with me:
“Something is not right, and deep down you know it.”
I would qualify those words more carefully today. A feeling that something is wrong does not always reveal a hidden truth. Anxiety may be anxiety, and suffering may require treatment. At other times, circumstances need to change. What a person needs might be protection, justice, therapy, medication, economic assistance, or direct action.
But there is another experience I was trying to describe. It happens when the explanations through which we have interpreted our lives no longer correspond to what we are actually experiencing.
The doctrine says one thing while your life says another. The institution tells you everything is fine while something in you knows it is not. The culture promises that achievement will make you happy, and you achieve what you were supposed to achieve only to discover that the promised arrival never comes.
You were told that marriage would complete you, faith would secure you, money would free you, healing would finish you, or the right worldview would finally make everything cohere. Then life happens, and the map and the territory stop matching.
Today I use the term reality contact for part of what becomes necessary at this point. Reality contact is our ability to meet experience without immediately reshaping it to fit an explanation.
This is harder than it sounds because explanations do more than explain. They hold worlds together. They give us identities, communities, moral frameworks, expectations, and some sense of where we stand.
Sometimes greater contact with reality begins when we allow an explanation to fail.
I now use the phrase existential exposure for those periods when something that helped us navigate existence stops working. A worldview collapses. An identity no longer holds. Someone dies. A marriage ends. A career disappears. An institution betrays our trust. The future we assumed we would have becomes impossible.
The structure changes or disappears, but the realities it mediated remain. Mortality is still here. So are uncertainty, desire, suffering, isolation, meaning, belonging, and the responsibility of deciding what we will do with the life in front of us.
This is one reason leaving religion does not necessarily resolve the existential questions religion was attempting to answer. Sometimes leaving religion exposes those questions more directly.
When meaning is no longer prescribed, we have to participate in making it. Without an external authority to settle every question, we begin the difficult work of trusting our own discernment. And as certainty falls away, we discover that uncertainty is part of the condition in which every human life is lived.
I spent years thinking I was primarily dismantling Christianity. Looking back, something larger was happening. I was discovering what it meant to live when the map ran out.
There is another sentence in that old passage that means more to me now than it did when I wrote it:
“It is your own questioning. It is your personal yearning.”
I had spent years in religious environments where curiosity could become suspicious. Some questions were welcome because the system already contained their answers. Others reached deeper, challenging the authority of the system itself. Those were harder to accommodate.
Institutions of every kind have reasons to fear certain questions. Questions expose contradictions. They destabilize settled arrangements. They return attention to the experience of the person rather than leaving authority entirely with the system.
I gradually began to wonder whether the questioning itself might contain something worth listening to. The discomfort might be telling us that the life we are living no longer corresponds to what we know. The longing might reveal something that has been constrained. Uncertainty might sometimes mark the beginning of greater freedom rather than evidence that we have lost our way.
This eventually became part of what I mean by self-authorship. Self-authorship does not mean inventing ourselves from nothing or refusing the wisdom of others. None of us created the language, culture, history, relationships, or circumstances into which we were born.
It means recovering our participation in the interpretation and direction of our own lives. We listen to others, learn from traditions, revise ourselves, and remain open to being wrong, but we no longer surrender the authorship of our lives to an authority simply because it claims the right to possess it.
The questions become ours, and so does the responsibility of living them.
Looking back across the years, I can see a movement in my work that I could not see while I was living it. I began inside a world of answers, then started questioning them. Eventually, my attention turned to something deeper than either believing or disbelieving.
I wanted to understand what enables a human being to live when no answer can remove the fundamental conditions of being human.
That question moved my attention from certainty toward capacity, from explanation toward participation, from finding the correct map toward becoming more capable of meeting the territory.
It is also why Existential Health is not another belief system. It does not offer an official answer about God, ultimate meaning, death, or the nature of reality. Religious and nonreligious people alike eventually encounter realities their beliefs cannot make disappear.
What interests me now is the development of capacities that make a life more inhabitable from the inside: remaining in contact with reality when it contradicts what we hoped would be true; participating in meaning without a final explanation; choosing without guarantees and belonging without abandoning ourselves.
These capacities allow us to love what we know we cannot keep and to encounter suffering without forcing it into an acceptable story. They help us remain available to beauty, relationship, wonder, responsibility, and possibility, even though uncertainty will never disappear from the human condition.
These are not questions about mastering life. They concern our capacity to participate more fully in a life that will always exceed our ability to control it.
There is something moving about discovering that an idea you can now articulate carefully once existed only as an intuition. When I wrote Notes from (Over) the Edge, I wasn’t trying to develop a field. I was trying to understand my life.
I was trying to understand my life. I knew the old answers were no longer working, but I was also beginning to see that endlessly replacing them with new answers would not resolve the deeper problem. There was something underneath the explanations that deserved my attention rather than another attempt to silence it.
I called it longing, disharmony, suffering. Today I have more language for what I was encountering. Human beings need more than explanations about existence. We need the capacities required to inhabit existence itself.
That realization did not arrive all at once. I wrote my way toward it, questioned my way toward it, lost my way toward it, and lived my way toward it. Only later did I begin calling it Existential Health.
The terminology came later, but the question had been there all along.
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