There is always purpose in being, but not always a being in purpose. – Mark Nepo

I have sought to be awake to life for a long time.

I founded the Wide-Awakeness Project in 2003 to understand and live awake to life. My larger wide-awakeness project began when I was diagnosed with Turner syndrome – a genetic condition which is a leading cause of miscarriages, also often resulting in short stature, infertility, heart and kidney issues, and cognitive and social difficulties – at the age of 15. At that point, I was faced with several existential questions: Why did I survive? If my life was going to be different, how could it still be meaningful? And finally, How could I pay this gift of life forward? My diagnosis and prognosis forced me to ask these questions about my life’s purpose at a time when I would have rather been thinking about driving, and dating, or anything else. My wide-awakeness project continued when I participated in a study at the National Institutes of Health and my big questions were responded to by facts – facts that frame how I understand myself and my position in life.

I started studying the concept of wide-awakeness in graduate school.

The arts, specifically theatre, had saved my life along the way and I wanted to understand that gift more completely. I was a high school drama teacher wanting to create wide-awakeness in my students but that quickly ended under the weight of the educational system that asks so much of teachers and cares so little for the arts. My dissertation was part narrative excavation of my teaching experience, part love letter to Theatre teachers who show up every day for young people, part policy manifesto to administrators and policy makers in a position to understand and support the arts in meaningful ways, part research brief to parents and young people struggling to articulate the importance of the arts in our lives.

Here is some of what I have learned about wide-awakeness over many years.

Definitions of wide-awakeness have been offered to clarify the nuances of the concept. Alfred Schutz explains wide-awakeness as, “a plane of consciousness of highest tension originating in an attitude of full attention to life and its requirements.” Camus states, “one day the ‘why’ arises…at the end of acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time inaugurates the impulse of consciousness.”

Drawing from the existential phenomenological concept of experience and extending the progressivist search for learning-by-doing, wide-awakeness is about imagination and curiosity. It is about compassion and experimentation. It is about our stories and our bodies. It is about doing philosophy. That is what it means to be awake.