What makes you come alive.
Moving past the pressure of productivity.
And learning to hear the sound of the genuine within ourselves.
Don't ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.
Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman.
I have returned to these words by Howard Thurman many times over the past few months.
At first glance,
They sound like a comfortable sort of permission slip.
A cultural green light to follow our bliss,
Chase our passion,
And do whatever makes us happy.
But Thurman was not a peddler of cheap happiness.
He was a 20th century African American theologian,
Philosopher,
Mystic.
And civil rights mentor who believe deeply in the connection between our inner lives and the way we live in the world.
Born in 1899 and raised in segregated Florida.
He became an important spiritual influence on Martin Luther King Jr.
And other leaders of the civil rights movement.
He wasn't telling us to forget the suffering of the world and go find a self-absorbed joy.
Instead,
He challenged us to become the kind of people whose deep inner lives allow them to offer something unique.
Something the world desperately needs.
In 1980,
Speaking to the graduating class at Spelman College.
Thurman asked a deeper question.
What is your name?
Who are you?
And can you find a way to hear the sound of the genuine in yourself?
There is something within us that waits.
Listens,
And knows who we are beneath all the accumulated noise.
But catching that frequency requires an intentional discipline.
If we cannot hear it,
Thurman warned.
We will inevitably spend our entire lives being micromanaged by other people's expectations.
To notice what makes us come alive,
We have to expand our capacity to pay attention.
Aliveness isn't a theory.
It is learned through experience.
It requires casting ourselves directly into the river of life.
Letting it flow.
And keeping our eyes and hearts wide open to whatever shows up there.
Think of the disciples walking the road to Emmaus.
Blindly stepping alongside a stranger.
They didn't realize they were walking with the divine until later.
When they looked back and asked.
Weren't our hearts strangely warmed within us?
It was that first fragile stirring in the chest that alerted them to the significance of the encounter.
For me,
That strange warming happens in very unglamorous concrete moments.
It's a long walk through the wetlands or camping in the woods.
It's laughing with my family or getting completely lost down a rabbit hole studying spirituality.
Sometimes it's just the physical sensation of sun on my skin.
Watching a bird dive into the water for a fish.
Or listening to the rhythm of a poem.
These everyday snapshots reveal the vast internal depths we are actually capable of reaching if we stop moving so fast.
My natural default instinct is to immediately over-intellectualize these moments.
Because I am a highly analytical person,
I immediately start trying to justify,
Explain,
And unpack the spark.
What does this mean?
Where will it lead?
Is it useful?
But I am learning that analysis is a defense mechanism against presence.
I am now practicing how to just sit with the curiosity without making an impulsive decision.
Some excitements burn hot and vanish by Tuesday mornings.
Others linger for weeks.
If we let them sit without trying to put them to work right away.
They begin to mature.
Our culture filters everything through the transactional lens.
We ask,
What is the output?
Will it be productive?
What is the return on investment.
But the genuine voice inside us doesn't give a damn about a business plan.
It just feels right.
Life-giving,
Natural.
It pulls you toward an outcome that is completely unknown.
I tend to view the sound of the genuine and the experience of coming alive as two sides of the exact same coin.
The genuine is the still,
Small voice within.
Aliveness is our body's physical response to hearing it.
But listening is a casualty of modern busyness.
We are completely inundated by the endless scroll of social media,
Television,
Comparison,
And the pressure to climb whatever ladder is placed in front of us.
We move,
We consume,
And we distract ourselves because simply being alone in a room with our own thoughts feels too uncomfortable.
It is said that at the absolute peak of his global popularity and busy schedule.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu still spent around seven hours a day in stillness and silence.
Because he knew that without it,
He would lose touch with the genuine.
Teacher Kyra Juulingo notes that this frantic,
Compulsive habit,
Energy,
Causes our true vocation to suffer and lose clarity.
We accidentally get sucked into society's vocation instead of our own.
Stillness isn't the absence of work.
It is the space where our real work becomes audible.
The author Merabai Starr points to the ancient Jewish mystical concept of Tikkun Olam.
Mending or repairing a broken world.
The mystics believe that from the moment of birth,
Each of us is uniquely imprinted with our own specific strand of that repair work.
It is rarely grand or recognizable to the public eye.
It hides in plain sight.
We cannot weave the basket alone,
But your specific strand is inevitably linked to your aliveness and your joy.
There is a line from the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas that feels like a matter of life and death.
If you bring forth what is within you,
What you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
What you do not bring forth will destroy you.
What happens when we repeatedly silence our internal gravity because it isn't practical or profitable enough?
We become disconnected.
We become highly successful at living lives that don't actually belong to us.
In my own journey,
Listening to the sound of the genuine has meant feeling a persistent,
Aching call towards the soul.
It has required me to dismantle and deconstruct the rigid religion of my childhood.
Sorting through the rubble to reconstruct a spirituality grounded entirely in love,
Compassion,
And forgiveness.
I didn't reach this place overnight.
But the thought that keeps looping back to me.
The thing that refuses to leave me alone.
Is a desire to understand spiritual wounds.
And act as a companion for others who are trying to navigate their way.
Through the religious wreckage.
The more I sit with this,
The more I realize that I don't actually want to arrive anywhere.
I want to remain alive.
There is a raw,
Unfinished growing edge to being human that I find deeply compelling.
It is a vulnerable space where we are allowed to remain clumsy,
To remain listeners,
To remain people who are still in the process of becoming.
Perhaps the goal of a human life isn't to solve the riddle of what we are supposed to do once and for all.
Maybe we come alive simply by listening deeply enough to discover who is emerging inside us.
And then letting our daily lives organically take shape around that person.
That process is incredibly uncomfortable.
What you hear in the quiet will rarely align with the safe,
Predictable life you have spent years building.
It might mean changing a structure,
Letting go of a routine.
Disappointing someone you care about.
Or sitting in the dark waiting to see what happens next.
But that is exactly what Howard Thurman was getting at.
The world does not need more efficient,
Productive people checking boxes on the ladder of conventional success.
It needs people who have developed the calluses required to listen to their own depths.
Our joy does not have to be a cheap escape from the world's heavy suffering.
It can be the exact source of energy we use to help mend it.
What brings you alive is not a selfish luxury.
It is the very currency you were given to give away.
So create the space.
Notice the tightening in your chest or the warming of your heart.
Give it days.
Give it weeks.
See if it stays when the noise clears.
And when you begin to recognize that quiet,
Genuine voice asking to be brought forth.
Do not look away.
The world has more than enough people who think they know exactly what they are supposed to do.
What the world is starving for is people who have finally come alive.
With warmth and gratitude,
Brooke.
