This week, The Practice of Being Alive became available for Kindle preorder. After the writing, revising, conversations, and waiting, there is something astonishing about seeing a book become something another person can hold. The full release is October 13, and I’ve been feeling both the excitement of what lies ahead and the weight of everything that brought me here.
But the week’s writing reached beyond the announcement. It became an occasion to look back at the questions running through my work, and to ask what happens when those questions leave the page and enter our lives. How do we find ground when the world we inherited falls apart? How do we claim authority over our own lives and remain willing to be changed by what we discover? And how long will we keep reading about being alive before we risk living?
In ** I Wrote My Way Here: Seven books, 550 articles, and thirty years of following a question,** I looked back across a body of work that I could never have planned from the beginning. Writing has been one of the ways I discovered what I was asking. An experience would unsettle something I believed. A conversation would expose a gap in my understanding. I would follow a question onto the page and find that it had changed where I stood.
There is a temptation, looking backward, to make our lives appear more orderly than they were. We connect the dots and forget how much uncertainty existed between them. I want to remember that uncertainty. Much of what eventually became meaningful began as something unresolved, something I could neither explain away nor leave alone.
** The Question Was There All Along: Before Existential Health Had a Name** continued that exploration. Returning to my earlier books, I recognized threads of what I now call Existential Health: the struggle to inhabit our own lives, the cost of surrendering our judgment, the search for belonging that does not require us to disappear. The language developed over time. The human concern was already there.
You do not need to have followed my work for thirty years to enter this conversation. You might recognize its beginnings in your own life—in an answer that stopped satisfying you, a role that became too small, or a question you could no longer keep quiet.
That is where ** Dangerous Questions: What are you afraid to know?** enters the week’s conversation. Some questions feel dangerous because answering them could change a relationship, unsettle an identity, or require us to acknowledge something we have spent years avoiding.
We often speak about truth as though our only task is to locate it. Living with what we discover asks more of us. We might have to grieve, reconsider a commitment, admit that we were wrong, or begin a conversation whose outcome we cannot control. There are reasons people hesitate.
** Life’s Deepest Questions: Selected Essays on Being Human, Finding Meaning, and Life Beyond Religion** gathers a broader body of writing for those willing to stay with that inquiry. These essays explore mortality, meaning, identity, and the work of building a life beyond inherited beliefs. Read together, they offer several ways into questions that rarely yield to a single answer—and that continue unfolding long after an essay ends.
I am interested in making room for that difficulty without allowing it to decide everything. An honest question does not require an immediate overhaul of your life. Sometimes the first step is simply letting yourself hear it, without rushing to silence it with the answer you are supposed to give.
These concerns run through The Practice of Being Alive: Modern Humans in Search of Ground. In ** The Practice of Being Alive Available for Preorder: Finding Ground When the World You Knew Is Gone**, I shared the news that the book is becoming available to readers. It is written for people facing the human task of finding ground amid uncertainty, change, and the loss of familiar answers.
** Questions About Being Alive** offers another doorway into the book and the concerns behind it. If you are wondering how this work connects with your own experience, that article is a place to begin.
The book is now available for ** Kindle preorder on Amazon**, with the full release, including paperback, on
Promoting a book during a week that also included ** Stop Letting Authors Live Your Life: The danger of reading instead of living** feels appropriate to me. I want my writing to earn your attention. I also want to respect what only you can discover through living.
An author can offer language for an experience you have struggled to name. A book can widen your understanding and keep you company through a difficult passage. But the conversation you need to have, the judgment you need to exercise, the ordinary life asking for your participation—those remain yours.
** You Can’t Think Your Way Into It: Developing a Practice for the Human Condition** carries this further. Understanding something does not automatically give us the capacity to live it. We develop through encounters with uncertainty, responsibility, grief, affection, and limits. What we read becomes consequential as we bring it into those encounters and discover where it helps, where it falls short, and what experience asks us to revise.
A book can open a question that asks to be lived. That is the intention behind the six-week online course around The Practice of Being Alive, which I’m offering through the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality beginning Monday, November 9.
Through guided book readings, weekly practices, and live conversations with me, we’ll explore presence, self-trust, belonging, and living without guarantees. Together, we’ll consider what these ideas ask of us in our relationships, decisions, and ordinary days, with room to discuss both what the book opens up and what happens when we put it into practice.
Live sessions take place Wednesdays at 6 p.m. Central, November 11–December 16, with recordings available afterward. Please have your copy of the book ready when we begin.
The course is $249. As a thank-you to my Substack readers, both free and paid subscribers can enroll for $199 through October 25. Enter ALIVE50 at checkout to save $50. More details next week.
Looking across these seven articles, I see a conversation moving from the history of a question toward the practice of living with it. There is a new book to celebrate, and I’m grateful to share that moment with you. There is also the continuing work that brought the book into being: paying attention, questioning what we have inherited, and learning how to participate more fully in the life we have.
Thank you for reading, responding, and bringing your own experience into this work. As you revisit this week’s articles, begin with whichever title touches something alive for you. Give it some room. The question that stays with you might be asking for more than another answer.
If you’ve found something meaningful in my writing, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber or Founding Member. Your support helps me continue writing and gives us opportunities to connect beyond these pages.
A paid subscription, at $50 a year, includes paid content and membership in CNRS, where workshops, gatherings, and ongoing conversations bring us together around spirituality and the deeper questions of being human.
At $250 a year, Founding Membership includes those benefits and two private, hour-long video conversations with me each year. We can talk about your life and the questions that matter to you. Your support makes room for my writing and helps sustain this community, and I’m grateful you’re part of it.
