Alive - by Dave Smith

• instead of being burdened by guilt, shame and failure, you enjoyed
a new sense of freedom.
• instead of living without a real and clear sense of meaning, you
found and fulfilled your true life purpose.
Wouldn’t that make you feel more ‘fully alive’?
Where can we go to find these all-important qualities? A few years
ago, while researching in order to write a previous book on the whole
subject of wellbeing, 1 I came across a particular field known as
‘positive psychology’, which is the science and study of life’s positive
qualities. It examines human thoughts, feelings and behaviour, with a
focus on strengths instead of weaknesses, building the good in life
instead of simply repairing the bad. Barbara Fredrickson, in her book
Positivity, provides a good summary of this, highlighting the
importance of cultivating ‘Ten Forms of Positivity’: joy, gratitude,
serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe and love. 2
There’s much that we can learn from this approach. It has been
scientifically proven, for example, that if we consciously cultivate a
sense of gratitude, we’re more likely to feel better about ourselves
and our lives in general. 3 More broadly, seeking to improve our
mental and emotional wellbeing through adopting certain practices, or
receiving the wise input of others, is clearly a good thing.
But this isn’t the full answer. The problem with adopting a purely
psychological approach is that, while it may help propel us to be
‘successful’ in certain areas of our lives, we can end up still feeling
ultimately unfulfilled. No matter how many self-help books we read,
holidays we go on, relational boundaries we put in place, we still end
up unsatisfied.
You don’t have to subscribe to a particular faith to believe that