Living well is the result of an attuned sensitivity and responsivity to beings around us. We often miss the opportunity because we tend to close off from others. Thus, we need a renewed sense of responsibility; we need to shift our mindset from a human-centred ethics to a broader ethical way of being.

This broader sense means we come to be aware of what it means to live in the midst of a multitude of divergent ways of being — animals, plants, so-called inanimate things. Only in this way does our world become more meaningful and responsive. And yet we’re stopped from this experience by patterns of thought that insist on a unity to nature or being. So, we must transform ourselves and our ways of thought.

We must relinquish our habitual patterns to arrive at a new experience of other beings. In this book, we’ll spend most of our time tracking and being tracked by this kind of experience, seduced by and seducing it. The shape of this experience is the shape of living well. What we see on this journey is similar to what a tracker sees when they take in a vista; thus, we will pause on traditional philosophical issues, like truth, space and time, ontology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and the self, amongst others. On our quest, not solely intellectual, we strive together for a rigorous, enactive philosophy that opens us to the mysteries of being. For philosophy is one way to rigorously try to live a good life.