When I visited flourishing groups, I noticed that being with them felt different. They possessed a vibrancy, a switched-on responsiveness that showed up in their bodies. Their posture, in general, was relaxed; their heads were up and their interactions were fluid. Aliveness was the word I kept writing in my notebook: a feeling of being carried along in a river of energy that was headed somewhere good. I started keeping a list of the ways that aliveness showed itself:
- Looseness: They operated with slack in the system; they were comfortable with a bit of chaos.
- Stories: They tended to connect by exchanging narratives rather than information.
- Intuition: People operated instinctively, not mechanically.
- Laughter: They didn’t take themselves seriously.
- Small courtesies: They were aware of others’ needs and attentive to them.
The curious thing was, the source of this aliveness seemed to be located in moments in which the group did absolutely nothing. That is, they often stopped their activities and came together in ritual-like stillness, and in those quiet moments meaningful connections would arise. For instance:
- A couple on a farm, standing still for ten minutes, watching a bee on a flower.
- A team gathered shoulder to shoulder in a locker room, sitting in silence before a game.
- A neighborhood group preparing for a dinner — slowly placing each fork and knife.
- The crew of a fishing boat gathering on deck before the start of the day to drink coffee and watch the waves.
These moments were mostly defined by what they lacked. There was no deciding, no information sharing, no reaching for outcomes. Instead, they were about deliberately stopping — zooming out to take in the bigger picture, noticing and savoring connections. And somehow, these simple acts seemed to spark a sense of vitality in the people who shared them and in the people who witnessed them — including me.
My visits to these groups usually started out like any research project, with me focused on gathering information, asking questions, taking notes. But as the conversation unfolded, something would shift. Their way of engaging, of slowing down and truly noticing, had a kind of gravitational pull. Before I knew it, the interview would slip into deeper waters — family, life, what truly matters — and new ideas and connections would start to light up, as if the conversation was awakening something within me.
One time I spent a couple days with Ari Weinzweig, cofounder of Zingerman’s, a food emporium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that has bloomed from a tiny delicatessen into a thriving community of businesses. As our conversation was coming to a close, I asked Weinzweig, “Does it feel surreal, starting out as a dishwasher, and now all this?”
Weinzweig smiled. “All of life is surreal,” he said, and then he stopped for a moment and tilted his head toward me. “Little Danny Coyle, growing up in Alaska, wanting to be a writer.” I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t; his words hung in the air. Then he gave a friendly wink and walked away.
That night I lay awake, thinking about what Weinzweig had said, because it wasn’t the answer most people would have given. Most people would have responded with something conventional — they would have answered my question directly. But Weinzweig didn’t do that. He chose to zoom out, to illuminate a more mysterious connection. Little Danny Coyle, growing up in Alaska, wanting to be a writer.
As I lay there in the silence, I found my mind drifting back to the first books I’d ever loved: Johnny Tremain, Harriet the Spy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I thought back to when my parents had given me a Sports Illustrated subscription for my tenth birthday, how those stories would transport me to heroic, far-off happenings, and how, slowly, an idea had taken root: Maybe I could write stories like that.
Presence isn’t just heightened awareness; it’s a foundational shift in how we perceive and engage with the world, when our usual sense of self recedes and we feel alive with meaningful connection.
I remembered the stretch of college when I had let go of that dream and was grinding through pre-med classes, trying to convince myself that I was on the right path. How I’d started to feel a growing uncertainty, a restless tension that didn’t go away. Is this really what I want? I remembered how I’d gone on a long walk to think it through. It was late, nearly dark, and as I rounded a bend I saw an old man approaching — walking stick, canvas coat, tweed cap pulled low. As we passed, our eyes met. In that wordless moment a thought arose: You only get one life. And inside me a door creaked open, and a simple truth flooded in: I wasn’t going to medical school. I returned home after graduation and applied for an internship in the sports department of the Anchorage Times, the first step on the winding path that led me here. All of life is surreal.
My visits with flourishing people had a way of fostering those kinds of moments: bursts of aliveness that made life deeper and richer, lighting up parts of myself that I’d forgotten existed. Whenever I came back from a trip, I would start checking my calendar to see when I could return.
The word psychologists use to describe this experience is presence — the sense of living, breathing relationship with something greater than ourselves. Presence isn’t just heightened awareness; it’s a foundational shift in how we perceive and engage with the world, when our usual sense of self recedes and we feel alive with meaningful connection. Because it feels vivid and consequential, we often treat presence as something rare or magical. The truth is, presence isn’t mysterious at all. It’s what happens when we make an attentional shift; when we stop trying to extract something from the moment and instead allow ourselves to be shaped by it. Flourishing groups don’t treat presence as magic — they treat it as a practice.
This article Why fulfilled people make time for nothing at all is featured on Big Think.