The Art of Enjoying Being Alive

Love of Life

There is a certain kind of joy that doesn’t come from achievement, success, or even pleasure, but it comes from being fully here, present, in the moment.

That’s what this current energy is teaching for me. As we are coming closer to the end of the year, we are just celebrating Christmas, the being together with loved ones, family and friend. It does not matter if you celebrate it or not, love and joy are everywhere. This what this Gate 58 - The Love of Life energy means for me.

I’ve always known this joyful feeling well. Joy, for me, is not excitement or happiness in the “loud” commercial sense. It’s a bodily sense of yes to the moment. A feeling of certain kind of aliveness that shows up when I’m doing something I genuinely enjoy, not because it’s useful, productive, or impressive, but because I’m present inside it.

It can be work, or cleaning the house, or walking, cooking, writing, or simply sitting quietly and drinking my cup of coffee.

The moment joy appears, thinking fades into the background. There is no evaluation, no expectation, no future outcome to manage. Just the experience itself. And that’s the part that’s hardest to explain, because joy isn’t a concept. It’s an embodied state, especially for me.

For a long time, I thought joy meant making life (my life) better. Improving things around me. Fixing what doesn’t work. Challenging what feels off. I still feel that impulse deeply time to time, the desire to uplift, refine, bring more vitality into the world. But I’ve learned something important along the way, especially in the last few years, that if I’m not enjoying myself in the moment, my desire to improve life turns into pressure. And pressure slowly kills every joy I had before. The joy gone, bye bye, not having the feeling anymore. And of course I do not like that.

• Where are my joyous moments, the fun, I used to enjoy so much?

I’ve also learned that joy is deeply personal. What feels joyful to me might feel overwhelming or even painful to someone else.

Joy also temporarily and transient, that lights me up one day might not do anything for me the next. Joy is not a rule. It’s not a formula.

Joy is a living, moving experience that changes with time, mood, energy, and context.

There’s a temptation, especially for curious and driven minds, to turn joy into something to figure out and many time we just ask:
- Why am I not enjoying this?
- What’s wrong with me?
- How can I optimize this feeling, to be always available?

But joy doesn’t respond well to control, instead it appears when we stop trying to manage it.

When I look honestly at my own life, the moments where joy disappears are not because life is wrong, but because I’m no longer with it. I’m in my head, replaying, anticipating, judging, or trying to bend reality into a mental picture of how it (life) should be.

That’s when life starts to feel heavy. Flat. Mechanical. Not because it is, but because I’m no longer meeting it directly.

This energy, as I experience it, isn’t asking us to do more or less. It’s asking us to arrive, be in and with the moment we are in.

To notice the simple miracle of being alive in this exact moment, before it passes, before it’s analyzed, before it becomes a memory. Because once the moment is gone, we often realize it was perfect in ways we couldn’t see while trying to control it.

Joy doesn’t require a better world, it requires seeing this one clearly.

And maybe that’s the quiet invitation of this time of the year:
- Not to fix life.
- Not to escape it.
- But to enjoy it — honestly, imperfectly, right now.

Because when joy is present, life doesn’t need improvement. It reveals its beauty on its own.

How the Energy of Joy Grows and Shapes Itself?

This energy doesn’t arrive fully formed. It matures through experience, missteps, overstimulation, and wisdom. Joy learns itself through life.

1. Love of Life → Moods

At its root, this energy is a simple yes to being alive. A natural harmony with existence. Joy here isn’t loud or dramatic, it’s a gentle appreciation of being in the flow of the day.

This love and joy come in waves. One moment life feels rich and alive, the next it feels flat. Not because life changed, but because attention did. Joy appears and disappears like weather. This stage teaches sensitivity: noticing how easily joy fades when the mind steps in and tries to control.

2. Perversion → Indulgence

Here joy starts to get misunderstood.

Instead of being joy, we try to produce it. More stimulation, more pleasure, more intensity. Food, work, movement, experiences, even “self-care” can become compulsive. Joy collapses into indulgence.

This is where life starts to feel noisy:| Too much input; Too many expectations. And strangely, less real joy. This stage isn’t wrong; it teaches the body what false joy feels like.

3. Electricity → Dependency

Now the energy becomes electric. Alive. Charged.

In its mature form, this vitality comes from within — a self-sustaining aliveness that doesn’t need others to activate it. But before that, joy can become relational and dependent. We feel alive when others respond, join, stimulate, mirror us.

This is where enthusiasm can feel contagious… or exhausting. The lesson here is subtle: am I alive because life is moving through me — or because something external switched me on?

4. Focus → Overstimulation

Joy begins to refine itself.

At this stage, there’s a natural ability to focus on what truly nourishes aliveness. Not everything that excites is worth attention. Joy gains discernment. It knows where to land.

But when this focus isn’t yet stable, overstimulation creeps in. Too many projects, too many improvements, too many things to fix or optimize “for the sake of life being better.” The irony: joy loses itself while trying to enhance everything.

5. Defense → Temptation

Here joy learns self-respect.

There’s a quiet instinct to protect one’s vitality, to say no to what looks fun but drains integrity. Joy no longer needs to prove itself or chase experiences.

In its distorted form, though, this is where boundaries dissolve. The energy says yes to questionable stimulation, betraying itself in the name of excitement. The lesson is powerful: joy without self-honesty turns against itself.

6. Carried Away → Sovereign Joy

This is where joy becomes wise.

There is deep enjoyment of life, movement, stimulation, without losing oneself. The body knows when to engage and when to step back. Pleasure doesn’t swallow identity anymore.

In its shadow, this stage can lose itself entirely — swept away by experiences, roles, expectations. But in its maturity, joy becomes sovereign. It dances with life without being owned by it.

Final takeaway and Reflection on Joy

As I see my journey till now, during my life, I can tell you, what I have learned through these years, and that’s the following:

If I want to make life better, I first have to accept that it is already perfect.

Joy doesn’t fix life.
Joy reveals life.

When joy is embodied, improvement happens naturally, not from judgment, but from love.

When joy is absent, even perfection looks broken.

Life doesn’t need to be made better.
It needs to be experienced more honestly.

So there is nothing else to say: Go and Fekin’ enjoy life, to being alive, as it is.