What If Aliveness Is Data?
I have started gardening, which will be surprising to anyone who knows me and possibly most surprising to me.
I’ve been planting bougainvillea and lavender and seaside daisies, moving pots around, looking at patches of dirt and wondering what might grow there. I wander outside in the morning to see how everything is doing, as though something extraordinary might have happened overnight. I am interested in where the sun falls and what needs water and whether the thing I planted yesterday looks happier today. None of this sounds particularly remarkable, I know, but the other morning I caught myself standing in the garden looking at something I’d planted and realised how completely engaged I was.
That was the word that came to me. Engaged.
Not busy, because I have been busy for years. Not productive. Not even necessarily happy, because happy is such a big word and we ask it to carry far too much. I just felt interested in my own life, in the small things happening immediately around me, and it made me realise that perhaps I hadn’t felt quite like that for a while.
There was nothing dramatically wrong before I moved. That's important, I think, because we tend to tell stories about change as though something has to become unbearable before we're entitled to change it. I lived in a beautiful place. I had friends and community around me. I was minutes from the ocean. My daughters had grown up there. I knew where I belonged and where everything belonged around me. From the outside, and much of the time from the inside too, my life was perfectly fine.
And yet there were days when I could stay in bed for hours after I was awake. I’d find another thing to read, another thing to scroll, another reason not to get up yet. The blinds would stay closed and half the morning could disappear before I properly entered the day. I didn’t think of this as information. I didn't really think of it as anything. It was just something I did.
Now I get up.
I open the blinds. Squeaky and I go for a walk. I make coffee. I wander into the garden. And on a day like today, when it’s raining and the sea is active, I can hear the ocean crashing from inside the house.
My god, the sound.
I've been trying to understand why it gives me so much pleasure, because I lived near the ocean in Bondi too. I could walk to it in minutes and did for decades. But here, a block back from the beach, I can hear it and smell it in a way I couldn't there. Sometimes I walk past an open window and it catches me completely by surprise.
It reminds me of being a child, when the ocean was somewhere we visited rather than somewhere we lived. We'd go perhaps once a year and I remember the excitement of getting close enough to smell it before I could see it. Then finally catching that first glimpse and screaming, “I can see the sea and the sea sees me!”
Maybe that is part of what I am feeling now. Not simply pleasure in the ocean, but the return of noticing it.
And this is what I've been wondering about: perhaps we don't pay enough attention to these things.
When we try to work out whether our lives are working, we tend to reach for the things we can explain. Is the work good? Is the money enough? Is the house right? Are the relationships working? Am I successful? Am I secure? Does changing something make practical sense? We gather evidence, weigh things up, make lists, talk to people, try to arrive at a rational answer.
All of which is sensible. I do it too.
But there is another kind of information running underneath all of that, and I wonder how often we dismiss it because it is so difficult to quantify.
How alive do I feel inside my own life?
I don't mean we should abandon jobs because we're bored on a Tuesday or move house because we've had a bad week. There are seasons when life is difficult, when work is simply work, when staying and tending to something is far more courageous than leaving it. I don't think every uncomfortable feeling is an instruction.
But I do wonder about the patterns.
The things that consistently give us energy and the things that drain it. The work we become absorbed in without noticing the time. The conversations we leave wanting more of. The people around whom something in us softens. The places where we breathe differently. And, equally, the things we continually avoid, put off or have to force ourselves through.
Perhaps all of that is data too.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to know yourself, and much of that work has been about values and identity and understanding what matters to us beneath all the roles we play. I still think that's enormously important. But I'm starting to think knowing yourself may also be much more physical and ordinary than I have sometimes made it.
Maybe it's noticing.
Noticing that you have started opening the blinds again. That you want to get out of bed. That you've become inexplicably interested in lavender. That you hear the ocean through a window and stop whatever you're doing just to listen.
I couldn't have known any of this before I moved. There was no version of the decision-making process where I could have written down, If I leave Bondi, I will become more interested in my own life. I didn't know that I would garden or wake differently or feel calmer. I didn't even know how much I needed those things because I hadn't experienced them yet.
I just knew, somewhere underneath all the thinking, that it was time to change something.
The evidence came afterwards.
And maybe that is what has interested me most. We so often wait for evidence before we trust ourselves, when sometimes we can only gather the evidence by moving. We have to experience another way of living, working or being before we can understand what the old way was asking of us.
So I am paying more attention now. Not trying to turn every feeling into meaning or every good morning into proof that I've made the right decision. Just noticing what happens when I feel more like myself, what seems to bring me closer and what seems to take me further away.
At the moment, the evidence is fairly ordinary.
Open blinds. Morning walks. Dirt under my fingernails. Lavender. A dog waiting at the door.
And somewhere beyond the houses, the sound of the ocean.
Maybe aliveness is data too.
Tuggerah Lake at sunset
Storymaker is where I write about the things I can’t stop thinking about — how we know ourselves, what shapes us, what matters, and how we make choices about the lives we want to live.
