This movement was born when a group of friends friends had the same realization at the same time on the same night. The realization was hysterically simple.

They realized that they were “alive.” And then they realized, “holy shit,” that’s pretty amazing.

Now, we can imagine you sitting there reading that last sentence and silently mouthing “Duh” to yourself. But before you mouth anything, we’d just ask that you take a second and query yourself the following: How much of your day is spent living in the base-line awareness that your very existence is a friggin’ miracle?

The reason I ask is because if I had to wager, I’d say it’s not nearly as much as the time you spent wishing your job was more fulfilling, that your parents were less annoying, that your partner
was nicer, or that your kids were easier, the weather was better, your bank
account was fatter, that you were skinnier, the list goes on and on....

If you get depressed thinking about that, take heart.
You’re not alone. Most of us do this.

We humans go through life with this sort of low-level hum of
dissatisfaction. It’s a big part of what makes us, us. In fact, it’s this drive to
change our circumstances, to improve, to hack our conditions, that has
helped us grow from small bands of hunter gatherers to larger agricultural
societies to the enormous, interdependent information-based mega-cities of

today.

Yet all this thinking and emoting and striving and doing and struggling has
come at a terrible cost. We’ve lost the ability to do one very essential thing,
which is honor the “holy-shit- ness” of our of daily existence.

Why?

Perhaps because this precious gift called consciousness is so seamless and
glitch-free that for most of our lives we feel like it’s not enough. It’s almost

too vanilla. So what do we do?

We pile thoughts, memories, resentments, hopes, expectations over it like
toppings at an ice cream sundae bar, until the bare miraculous fact of this “I

am-ness” is completely covered.

It is our hope that these items can be a fun, thought-provoking, sense-
stimulating way to strip off all the crap we put on our perfect scoops of
consciousness ice-cream so that we can all live in the joyous reality of the

one thing we should never, ever forget.

Holy Shit, We’re Alive.