MSI Press Blog

  What Does It Mean to Be Alive? Not “to survive.” Not “to function.” Not “to keep going.” But to be alive. It’s a question that slips past the medical charts and the calendars. It doesn’t ask how many breaths you’ve taken. It asks whether you’ve felt them. To be alive is not just to exist. It’s to respond. To notice. To choose. It’s the difference between a body and a presence. Between a schedule and a soul. Aliveness is not performance. You don’t have to be busy, productive, or impressive to be alive. You don’t have to be cheerful or strong or “doing great.” You just have to be here. With your senses open. With your heart engaged. With your mind not numbed by habit or fear. Aliveness is not constant. We drift in and out of it. We lose it in the rush. We find it in the quiet. We forget. We remember. Sometimes we feel most alive in grief. Sometimes in laughter. Sometimes in the moment we stop pretending. Aliveness is a practice. It’s in the way you greet ...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie. -5-   Don’t ask what the world needs; ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.   -         Howard Thurman   Several years ago, I was in Chicago for a professional conference. Life-long baseball player, fan, and addict that I am, I never pass up an opportunity to see a major league game on the road. I took the Red Line to the Sox-35 th  Avenue stop for U. S. Cellular Field (where the White Sox play; it will always be “Comisky Park” to me) and got off with the crowd. On the platform was a small, thin, elderly man with Chinese features, playing a two-stringed fiddle (which I later learned is called an erhu) with the accompaniment of a small CD player. The music had a beat to it and was really moving along. His eyes were closed, ...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie: -49-   To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.   Ho...