Exploring Life
This site is a gathering place for creative people interested in pursuing a greater sense of depth and meaning in life. We embrace the ideal of living a creative life. The opportunities, limitations, vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and mysteries of everyday life provide us with the raw materials for creative expression. In this sense, we are all artists working with a unique confluence of situations and circumstances that become our course in life.
Exploring Life is a creative and imaginative work. It is an adventure demanding creativity, discernment, and a willingness to confront the fierce realities of everyday life. And it provides a journey into the art of living. Sometimes the journey will feel uplifting and inspiring. At other times it will remind us of our vulnerability, fragility, and impermanence.
This work promotes the ideal of living an authentic life inclusive of all the joy and hardship that involves. We all face a unique array of opportunities and limitations in in terms of what is and is not possible in life. Our task is to stand firmly on the frontiers of our own experience and craft a course in life that is authentic, creative, and benevolent.
The Frontiers of Experience
A frontier is an outer limit where the comfort of the familiar morphs into the strange and unfamiliar. These are the rough edges of experience holding the potential to discover something remarkable about life. Liminality permeates the frontiers of experience. We all encounter disruptive situations that demand change we are unprepared to make. Once we step into a frontier of experience there is no possibility of retreat. This is the liminal space in which a true artistry of living becomes possible.
Five broad frontiers of experience provide the structure for Exploring Life: aging, learning, wellbeing, liminal encounters, and life lessons. The reason they have been selected is that they are central to the life experiences of the author. They are not the only possible frontiers, but each one resonates within the human condition. In this sense, they have universal appeal, and everyone can relate to them in their own way.
This work presumes that creativity is an ideal way to navigate the opportunities, challenges, and inevitable disappointments in life. To live a creative life is to confront and engage with the subjective experience of being alive like an artist transforming raw material into aesthetic insight. The raw material of a creative life is directly felt experience, complete with all its joy and sorrow, happiness and grief, celebration and hardship, as well as belonging and loss.
Brian Alger
The author of this site is Brian Alger. He is a writer and musician, as well as a retired educator and entrepreneur. Moreover, Brian the thread that connects Brian’s eclectic experiences in life is creativity. Now, at 60 years of age, he is focusing his creativity on finding meaning in the “final third” or culminating phase of life.
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