safe and alive

both at once!

Pleading, 1984 by Jeff Wall

Safety without aliveness is deadening; aliveness without safety is disorienting. You can tell where you have room to grow by examining your relationship and asking yourself what you’re more afraid to expect: safety or aliveness?

If you want to know if something is alive, ask yourself: does it thrill me?

If you want to know if something is safe, ask yourself: do I intuitively feel I can depend on it in every realm that matters?

If you care too much about safety, you’ll be terrified of risks that lead to more aliveness because you’re so indexed on what you might lose: This is good enough.

If you care too much about aliveness, you’ll struggle to create a solid foundation from which to experiment and grow, or the intuitive sense that you are fully held.

If you’re never experienced safety and aliveness at the same time, you probably doubt that they can coexist. We love to depict them as mutually exclusive in our culture. Manic pixie dream girl or nagging wife. The guy you fuck versus the guy you marry.

Dating is somewhat of a luck problem, but mostly it’s a search problem. Most of us are bad at it because we don’t understand what makes us feel both safe and alive in work, love and life. If you don’t believe it’s possible, you might not recognize it when it shows up.

For most of my life I couldn’t find the love I wanted because I was unable to let it in. I wasn’t ready. We think of giving a skill, but receiving is also often a learned ability. Discernment matters. You might conceive of yourself as having high expectations, but that doesn’t matter if you expect the wrong things. How in touch are you with what actually matters the most to you?

My sense for most of us is: not very. Getting in touch with what you really want requires a level of intuition that we’ve either explicitly tuned out or never listened to in the first place. What does your body say, what does your heart say, which is the voice of fear and which is the voice of love? What are you bracing against, is it really so bad? It takes time and sincere personal work to answer these questions.

I always think about Elizabeth Gilbert’s anecdote in Big Magic about how ideas will find you, but also leave you if you don’t sincerely give yourself over to them. I believe that love is the same way. You have to give yourself to it it; you have to work at it; you can pretend to yourself, but you can’t pretend to the universe. If you give yourself over to the right love, however, you might just feel the best of all feelings: safe and alive.