(Written mid-October 2025)

For quite a while now, I’ve been haunted by the idea that I’m not living my life. That I’m just existing. I watch others live their lives in reels, TV shows, and movies. I’m moved by both reality and fiction. I get caught up in the characters, even in short films.

I also love to hear what is happening in the lives of friends and family. Face-to-face conversations, Facebook posts, text conversations, phone calls, and holiday letters keep me looped in to what’s going on in their lives. I could spend all day, for days at a time, just listening, watching, observing, reading, and being in conversation with others. 

But is that living?  

Isn’t living supposed to be adventurous, thrilling, stepping into the unknown, seeing and experiencing things you haven’t, and learning from new experiences?  

Robert loved words and left me, at his death, a great book, Dictionary of Word Origins: The Histories of More Than 8000 English-Language Words, by Johan Ayto. ‘Live’, as discussed by John, is ultimately from the prehistoric Germanic “lib”, which meant to remain, or continue. 

Variants of that same prehistoric word produced ‘leave’ and ‘life’.  He ends his text with this sentence, “The adjective live is a reduced form of alive, which is derived from life” (pg 326). Live, with a long ‘i’ sound (as in a live concert), is an adjective, a word that describes something.  Live, with a short ‘i’ sound (as in living life), is a verb. 

What if I’ve been living life as an adjective instead of a verb? 

Now I was intrigued, so, of course, I had to look up ‘life’. This time, the definition stopped me in my tracks. 

Ayto, in describing how the prehistoric Germanic lib became both the English words live and life, says, “The semantic connection between ‘remaining’ (lib) and life – and the closely related live – is thought to lie in the notion of being ‘left alive after a battle’.”  

What?!?  Live and life are related to grief?  

If you’ve been left alive after a battle, and we all have, each and every day, then we are living.  We are alive. Just simply by continuing to be. 

When we share our stories of our griefs, big and life-changing or little and disappointing, we are sharing our stories of being left alive after a battle. When we watch a TV show where someone survives a horror or an unexpected occurrence, we gain a new understanding of what it means to be left alive after a battle. When we see a movie or watch a reel that recounts someone doing something extraordinary for another living creature, in whatever form that creature takes, we mentally participate in the story of surviving a battle. These are stories of life, and they are stories of grief. Yet, as stories of grief, they are also stories of hope, efficacy, resiliency, and optimism. 

I think I’ve been asking too much of the verb live (short ‘i’) and the adjective live (long ‘i’). Who’s to say that being live (long ‘i’), being present to the stories around me, is not a thrilling adventure? Through stories, yours included, I get to step into the unknown, see and experience things I haven’t, and learn from new experiences. It’s through the stories I read and hear, and the stories I share, that I learn and grow . . . that I live (short ‘i’).