Glad I’m Here for This – Life is About More Than Just Surviving
There's a man in my building. I'll call him Jim.
Every time I run into Jim — in the hallway, on the stairs, out in the parking lot — I ask him the same question. "Hey Jim, how's it going?"
And Jim gives me the same answer. "Oh, you know… I'm surviving."
Sometimes he'll add a chuckle and say "barely" — like it's a joke, but not quite. Sometimes he can't even get that far. Sometimes it's just a long sigh, a half-smile, and a "well…" that trails off into something he doesn't finish.
Occasionally he'll land on "I'm alive, I guess." And I gently remind him "That's a good thing, Jim."
And then he moves on, and so do I, and I carry that exchange with me for the rest of the day.
Jim has had a rough year. A hip replacement. A heart attack. He talks about retirement the way some people talk about a rescue — like the moment he gets there, he can finally exhale. He's got a beautiful wife, a daughter, and a son. By most measures, a full life. And yet something sits just beneath the surface of every conversation we have. Something heavy. Something unspoken.
I don't know Jim's full story, and I'm not here to assume it. But I feel for him. Deeply. Because here's what I keep thinking about:
What if surviving is all we ever let ourselves do?
The Miracle We’ve Stopped Noticing
I've been on a bit of a journey lately. Call it a shift, an awakening, a recalibration — whatever word works for you. But I've arrived somewhere I didn't expect to. A profound, almost overwhelming sense of gratitude for the sheer fact of being here. Not for the big stuff, necessarily — though yes, that too. But for the ordinary stuff. The cup of coffee in the morning as sunlight streams through the kitchen window. The ridiculous, improbable miracle of another day.
I don't say this to sound enlightened. I say it because it snuck up on me. And once it arrived, I couldn't un-see it.
We are spinning on a rock through an infinite universe, and somehow we get to be here, in these bodies, with these people, in this moment. The odds against any of us existing at all are so astronomical they barely compute. And yet — here we are. Alive. Much better than the alternative, I dare say.
The Weight of Being Thankful
Gratitude gets a bad rap sometimes. It can sound like a greeting card. A hashtag. A wellness platitude served with a side of lavender. But real gratitude — the kind that actually changes something in you — isn't soft at all. It has weight to it. And with that weight comes something that took me a while to name.
Responsibility.
If life is a gift — and I believe it is — then at some point we have to ask ourselves what we're doing with it. Not in a harsh, self-critical way. More like an honest reckoning. Are we showing up for the days we've been given? Are we finding something — anything — to savor in them? Or are we just getting through, just surviving, just counting down to some future moment when we'll finally allow ourselves to feel okay?
I think about Jim when I ask myself these questions. I think about how easy it is to get stuck in a life where we're a passenger rather than the one at the wheel. Health challenges, work stress, the slow grind of waiting for something to change — I understand all of it. It's real. It's heavy. I'm not dismissing any of it.
But I also know this: even on the hard days, even in the middle of the grind, there is something here worth noticing. Something worth pausing for and being thankful for — even something small. Maybe just hearing someone you love laugh from the other room and thinking "Yeah… I'm glad I'm here for this."
Even the Imperfect Days Count
A lot of us spend a significant portion of our waking hours at work. And if you're in a job you don't love right now — or a season of your career that feels like more obligation than purpose — I'm not going to tell you to just be grateful and smile through it. That's not useful advice.
But here's what I will say… that job, even an imperfect one, is part of the life you've been given. The colleagues, the commute, the coffee machine that's always out of order — it's all part of the texture of your days. And somewhere in that texture, if you look, there is something. A moment of connection. A problem solved. A quiet sense of contributing something.
And maybe that job you don't love is just something you need to do right now to keep the lights on and feed your family. Gratitude doesn't require a perfect life. It just requires a willingness to look.
The First Line Isn't the Whole Story
I still see Jim. We still have the same exchange, more or less. I still tell him I'm glad he's surviving, because I am. Another day above ground is a good day. I mean that.
But I hope, somewhere underneath it all, Jim knows that surviving was never supposed to be the ceiling. It was supposed to be the floor. The place you stand on, not the place you stay.
We get this one life. One spin. And every single day we're upright and breathing is another chance to do something with it. But we do have to show up. For the day in front of us. For the people in it. For the version of ourselves that deserves more than just getting by.
Jim is still out there surviving. And I'm rooting for him. But I'm also rooting for something more for him. The same way I'm rooting for all of us.
Surviving was never supposed to be the whole story. It's the first line. What comes next is up to you.
If this piece stirred something in you, that feeling is worth following. A good place to start is by giving your mind a few minutes of genuine quiet. Our guided meditations on the Workforce Nation YouTube channel here and podcast (below) are designed for exactly that — no experience needed.
