When do you feel the most ALIVE?

I wondered about this after my uneventful anxiety filled day today.

I figured I feel most alive when I am least aware of the passing of time.

How about you?

In the mountains, especially in the High Sierra wilderness, polished granite, small springs with tiny wildflowers and lower down pocket meadows and mountain heather, trees bent by the wind and twisted, gnarled, desd trunks of ligtning killed pines weathering at altitude. The smell of wildness.

Never. I might be the walking dead. No wonder i like nighttime and hate the sun. How do you go about "feeling alive"?

I feel most alive when I am most in awe. It could be a work of art, a page of a book, a beautiful or beloved person, a force of nature. To be confronted with that which is so novel as to force ourselves to think and understand something new about the world and, therefore, ourselves. It is to forget everything else but for that moment in time and simply behold what we could never imagine.

There are other times, rarer, when I find myself so content by being with the people I love, knowing they are also happy, and simply enjoying the pleasure of our mutual company, that I feel immensely grateful to be alive and to know that those I love feel the same way.

August evenings just as the sky turns to a peach pink haze, the heat of the day begins to fade. Fresh corn and cold steak, good beer and homemade salsa. On the verandah with friends, watching the sun slowly fade and then hang, as if the gloaming will never end. Time stops for just a little while as conversations held in shorts and t-shirts wander happily far into the lantern-lit night.

This is gonna sound pathetic, but it's true.

There's a club down here that plays vintage disco and hi-NRG (1975-85) on Sunday evenings. I started going to clubs when I was 18 in 1978, and chased the scene almost every night until I was 30.

When I'm on that dance floor, music booming (it sounds so different at "radio" volume) and lights going, I feel for just a moment like I'm still in my 20s. I don't feel the arthritis in my neck or the Peripheral Neuropathy in my ankles. It's a really incredible sensation.

I get something different, but just as transcendental when I'm really in the moment while fucking. It's not a nostalgia, obviously, because it's all very much in the here and now, all nerves zinging in unison. But it's similar because I don't feel any discomfort during sex, just pleasure.

I always feel alive. If you mean when do you feel happiest, that I can answer. I only feel dead when I am dead tied.

Your thread did remind me of the song Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls...

And you can't fight the tears that ain't coming
Or the moment of truth in your lies
When everything seems like the movies
Yeah you bleed just to know your alive

and also a song by The Chameleons called Soul in Isolation...

In total isolation
Surrounded by fears
Too many clowns ,too many tears
Isolation
Surrounded by crowds
In another world,head in the clouds!
I'm alive in here, i scream!
But you still can't hear
I'm alive, turn on the light

and Pearl Jam ...Alive

You're still alive, she said
Oh, and do I deserve to be
Is that the question
And if so...if so...who answers...who answers...
I, oh, I'm still alive

I feel the most alive.. when I have achieved something very important for me!... you get the feeling that it was worth the hard work

:D

I feel alive:

-when I accomplish something of importance to me
-when my creative juices are flowing
-when I make a client happy with their new space
-when I spend time with friends and family
-when I have the opportunity to see beauty in any form
-whenever I witness an act of kindness or find an opportunity to perform one.

but most of all, when i'm in love.

About the only time that happens for me is when I'm working on something that really takes all my attention. Then I don't realize the passing of time.
It's a very rare thing for me that this will happen.

I agree that completing challenges and accomplishing things makes me feel alive, but all of those throughout my professional career, led to one thing.... me being here....
here

And this is where I feel most alive ever!
And in fact I now wonder whether for all that I used to thrive on all those challenges and accomplishments, were they not, in other ways, just killing me?!!?

Looks like an interesting place. I'll never know...

Yep, that's about the size of it. All our hard work is doing is killing us over time. What does it all amount to???

Well having pushed myself to the limit, I packed it all in.
I reckoned at the age of 40, if I didn't, I wouldn't see 50

So now I live by the beach and see that view pretty much every night.
And, in my humble opinion, am now more alive than ever!

It is worth taking the time to wonder what it's all about. We only get one shot at this life and may as live it to the full!

I wish I could do that. The only way would be if I win the lottery.

If things stay as they are I'm not sure if want to see 50...

Wales does that to you. Cross the border and you can feel the magic rise up out of the ground. Ancient things aren't so far away there. Spectacular place.

OK... I know I am lucky to be able to do what I'm doing... it was just hard work and good investing

A shocking statement to some but I'd asked myself the same question. If things had stayed the same, then probably no. So I set about changing 'things'! And now I think I do!