What does it mean to be human? Drinking in this juicy question, my mind jumps in and out of puddles of perception. Ideas of my own humanness run through my head, flashes of words commonly found in greeting cards and graduation speeches - love, inspiration, creativity, connection, beauty, wonder, purpose, harmony... But these things seem to fall short of a definition. My first impulse in seeking a definition is to try to capture what is uniquely human. However, that seems to be a presumptuous task, having only looked out of one pair of human eyes. Even if we were to find a way to strip away the qualities that are not uniquely human, it seems we would be left with little more than a broken piece of the puzzle.
So perhaps it is more appropriate to seek an inclusive definition. A definition that does not attempt to separate us from the monkeys and the Earth and the stars.
To be... to exist, a tiny phrase with profound implications. It at once suggests an active stillness, a verb that refuses to be limited to movement and time. What does this little phrase add to our question? It points us to the experience of being human. So perhaps to find what it is to be human, we must look both at the actions (what do humans do) and the experience underneath the actions (what is it to exist as a human).
Being human is all things animal. It is tasting and seeing and touching and hearing and smelling. It is hunger and sex and breath and sleep. It is using a body to experience the world, and it is also to be the world.
Being human is to use or to have a mind. It is to think and feel and question and fear and learn. It is to struggle with illusions of separateness. It is to crave connections - to other people, to nature, to the source. It is to be tangled up in language, and to have a sense that there is a truth beyond language.
Being human is to want to be reasonable, and at once to almost need to believe in things that are not reasonable at all. It is to believe in things like time, identity, purpose, god, free will, or money. It is to struggle and experience conflict.
Being human is to desire. It is to want peace or healing or companionship or pleasure or revenge or truth or power. Being human is also to be able to step outside of desire and belief and time. It is to step outside of the chatter of the mind and simply be.
Being human is to create. It is to create meaning and realities and art and life and relationships.
And in the words of my 6 year old friend, being human is a joke, it is going to school, and it is eating ice cream. Perhaps that's it - laughing, learning, and chocolate.
