How to be Human

So, you do the things that you do - show up to meetings that could have been emails, respond to texts, laugh with friends, hide in your own existence, cry, show up to places you would rather not, and still carry this question - what does it mean…to be human?

Is it the weight of our pain? The sum of our failures? Is it the way we bruise and bleed and break? The sound of our cries?

Is it the feelings we avoid, or those we choose to express? Is it the hurt we carry? Is it the heaviness in our chests that makes our nights restless?

Is pain the one thing we all share as a species?

So many questions.

Maybe being human is about the places we have been and the lives we have experienced in those places. Perhaps those places carry our scents, and maybe that grounds us to the earth.

But if it’s about places, why do we walk away too soon from places that give us life and stay too long in places that steal our joy? Why didn’t they teach us about that balance in school?

Come to think of it, what did they actually teach us?

They taught us to be strong. Unshakable. Unbreakable. They told us to hold it together and never let the world know that we are not okay. They demonised our tears and silenced our feelings.

They told us that success is outward, what people can see, and it doesn’t matter who comes between us and our goal. They taught us to gather without thinking about anyone else - that’s why we have the kind of president we have.

They taught us it’s about perfection, getting everything right and fitting in a script. That’s why they use words like ‘rebel’ or ‘black sheep’ or ‘lost souls’ when we don’t follow the scripts they handed to us.

They taught us to walk like we don’t care to avoid being hurt. They taught us to put people at arm's length to protect our hearts. They convinced us that our curiosity is problematic, and we stopped asking questions.

They taught us certainty. To walk around as if we know everything. They taught us that saying ‘I don’t know’ is a disease. They demonised and diminished our curiosity.

Unrelated to this, and I’m not going to explain it any further. Please, never ask a Luhya for directions.

…a Luhya will explain to you a place they don’t know in great detail. When it comes to giving directions, they don’t have it in them to tell you they don’t know.

Anyway, they have taught us a lot about who and how we need to be. And a lot of what they have taught us has influenced who we are and who we are becoming.

I am using ‘they’ here because I don’t know who these ‘they’ are. I don’t know whether it was our teachers, parents, the adults in our lives or all of them. I don’t know whether they actively taught us all these things or we just observed how the world is and concluded that this was the best route to self-preservation.

But when you think about it, what are we self-preserving from?

From tears not falling?

From the cracks of our imperfect lives? The same cracks that let light in, the light that reminds us that our broken bodies still hold beauty?

From the tenderness and softness of our hearts that allow us to feel love, and joy, and peace?

From the trembling hands that reach out to a friend?

From the fragile word, sorry?

I don’t know much about being human, but I do know it’s about seeing, and allowing yourself to be seen.

To be human is to be fragile.

To love, and to lose.

To dream, and to fail.

To build, and to watch it crumble.

And still …. to try again.

Because beneath the tough exterior they have taught us to display, beneath the scars and our untold stories, we are stitched together with longing…for meaning, for belonging, for something bigger than ourselves.

To be human is to feel, to heal, to wonder, to lose yourself and still dare to find yourself.

I don’t know what will remind you of your humanity…

Perhaps it’ll be the sound of laughter echoing in your chest.

Or maybe the sight of someone who knows your name.

It could be the taste of a home-cooked meal in your memory.

Or a scent that pulls you back to a place where you were loved.

Or a touch that says, I see you. A touch that reminds you that you are held.

That is what it means to be human.

But then again, we can’t conclusively answer that question here, in one post, can we? That goes against the spirit of trying to wrestle with that question.

So maybe, a better place to end this is…

…to be human is to continuously find yourself, within yourself, and to keep showing that to the world.