This part of the KAN website is about what we are aiming for in our lives. Closely linked to this is what it is to be really well. The words we have to talk about this are problematic. The word ‘health’ has long since become attached to the territory of illness and disease and its treatment. In an attempt to broaden out the meaning, the newly fashionable word ‘wellbeing’ has been bolted on to become ‘health and wellbeing’. But this doesn’t help much. Instead, for this section of the KAN website we have chosen ‘coming alive’. This derives from this well known quotation attributed to Howard Thurman, a mentor and friend of Martin Luther King. They were both campaigners in the US black civil rights movement in the second half of the 20th Century.
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
It will be up to contributors to this section to interpret ‘coming alive’ in their own ways. We are all different, yet in some ways we are all the same. So expect to see both big differences and common threads in people’s responses to these two words. What does ‘coming alive’ mean to you? What makes you ‘come alive’?