What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman

by Lerita Coleman Brown

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.

MAKES YOU COME ALIVE “Once, when I was seeking the advice of Howard Thurman and talking to him at some length about what needed to be done in the world, he interrupted me,” writes Gil Bailie in the acknowledgments of his book Violence Unveiled. Thurman replied, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.”

I often remind people that the words silent and listen contain exactly the same letters, just rearranged. One must be silent to truly listen.

“The eye of the heart grows accustomed to recognizing, almost spontaneously, those (interior) movements that are drawing us into oneness with ourselves and all creation in God and those that tend to isolate us even from ourselves.”

in Thurman’s words, “follow the grain of your own wood” or “do what makes you come alive.”

Both Thurman and Gandhi believed that without the individual pursuit of the spiritual life, social transformation becomes unattainable.

Sue, Thurman’s wife, reported that in his final days in bed, as he moved in and out of consciousness, he continued to question the meaning of universal matters. Always an inquisitive soul, Thurman knew there was more to excavate, to discover, to contribute. He told Sue that “he encountered the ‘particular’ man and the ‘universal man’ within himself and wrestled them to earth, until he won the consent of both—to Life, to Death, and back to Life.” Howard Thurman passed away on April 10, 1981, at the age of eighty-one.