None were chasing intensity for its own sake. Their vitality came from alignment, a coherence between values and actions, body and tempo, self and world. Being around them taught me that aliveness hums most clearly in those whose inner frequency matches the life they’ve built, where what they love and what they do finally begin to rhyme.

They live as though each sense were a prayer.

“I wanted to eat life by the mouthful, to devour it, to be swallowed up in its dizzying vertigo, to be both actor and spectator, to possess and be possessed, to discover and to create, to make of my life a work of art.” — Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)