Most of us don't go missing from our lives all at once. We keep everything running ? the work, the messages, the ordinary days ? and step back from our own experience by inches, until we're living a little outside it. Nothing breaks. Nothing looks wrong. We're simply no longer quite here.

THE PRACTICE OF BEING ALIVE is about that distance ? the slow thinning of the ground beneath a life ? and how we come back into contact with it. It names a kind of health we don't have a word for: not of the body, which we call physical, or of the mind, which we call mental, but of your relationship to your own existence.

And instead of one more program for fixing yourself, it offers something plainer and sturdier ? a way of staying inside the life you're actually living, without waiting for it to resolve.

For anyone who is functioning fine and still feels absent, this is a book about coming back.