These thoughts are in honor of Sarah. Someone very dear, and fun, and safe, and who Tina and I are so very proud to call our friend …
I wish it wasn’t so hard to be human.
I wish humans weren’t such social creatures; so dependent upon each other’s care and approval. And have no doubt we are. We are not reptiles or fish, hatched from eggs with the capacity to fend for ourselves from day one. No, we are mammals. The most complex of mammals at that. And one of the many preconditions of that complexity is that we come into this world, like it or not, utterly helpless and dependent upon being valued by others. Here in America we love the myth of independence and the freedom of rugged individualism, but try as we might to deny it, our need for others is a condition we never outgrow.
To be sure, when that need is being met … life is heaven. There’s nothing like love and warmth and value and all the health that comes with it. But to depend upon one another, to be inextricably connected to one another, and receive wounds instead of healing, fear instead of love, betrayal instead of trust … that is hell.
So we bend and warp and stretch and strain to try and compensate. And when that doesn’t work we medicate to dull the pain. We tear down bridges, lock doors and build walls to separate ourselves from others in the hope that isolation will spare us. And perhaps that works, for a while. But just like a bad case of food poisoning doesn’t cure us of our ongoing need for food, in the end there is no escaping our emotional hunger. Isolation is just another version of hell, and the simple truth is we cannot and will not stop needing one another to be truly whole.
Damn.
There are other reasons it’s hard to be human. I wish my storytelling mind could just be switched off when it won’t stop spinning anxious thoughts about the future. I wish my nervous stomach could just be switched off when all it wants to do is internalize pain. I wish I didn’t have to work so hard to find balance between the long-term-me that sacrifices present comforts for future rewards and the in-the-moment-me that doesn’t want to sacrifice the present moment for a future that may or may not ever come. I wish humans weren’t so damn complex and so damn vulnerable—to the weather, to our bodies, to our social, racial, or economic status, to the lottery of our birth, to the ravages of time.
I wish it wasn’t so damn hard to be human.
To be human carries with it a heavy price, and if that price is all we choose to see then perhaps it’s simply too high. But what I’ve learned—and am still learning, slowly, awkwardly, often painfully—is that life itself is a treasure whose value is beyond any measure. Life, all of life, any life, my life, your life … is priceless. And despite all the prices we pay to be us, in the final accounting of what we give versus what we’ve been given, we make out like bandits.
And as for that human complexity we pay so dearly for … it may be full of wounds and troubles but it’s also capable of great learning, of great healing, of deeper connection, of breathtaking tenderness. If we choose to do the hard work, we can fix stuff, we can change direction, we can make better choices, develop new deeply meaningful relationships. We can live and laugh and love and even, as the old saying goes, restore the years the locusts have eaten.
Take it from a house whisperer … anything can be remodeled … including you and me. And the best news of all, you don’t have to do alone. Hang in there with me. We’ll share the load, and together we’ll do the work of building ourselves a beautiful life.
