being human

To be human is to carry a universe inside a body that is always changing. To wake each morning with yesterday still living somewhere in your chest, and somehow find the courage to begin again. To love things we know we cannot keep. To watch the seasons pass through the people we love, through the places we call home, through the faces we once recognized in the mirror. 

We spend so much of our lives trying to understand what it means to be here, searching for answers in the distance, when perhaps the answer has been breathing beside us all along.

Maybe being human is learning how to hold two truths at once. To be grateful and grieving. To feel lost and still believe in the way forward. To carry the weight of the world without forgetting the softness of a flower growing through concrete. We are made of the same earth we walk upon, the same elements that give birth to stars, yet we spend so much time convincing ourselves that we are separate from everything around us.

And somewhere between our first breath and our last, we begin to understand that life was never asking us to become something extraordinary. Perhaps it was only asking us to be present. To listen more closely. To forgive a little sooner. To sit beside someone in silence and let them know they are not alone. To notice the sunlight moving across the floor, the sound of rain against a window, the quiet miracle of another person existing at the same time as us.

We are here for such a brief moment, carrying memories of places that no longer exist, loving people we cannot always save, and leaving pieces of ourselves in the lives we touch. Maybe that is enough. Maybe being human is not about finding our place in the universe, but remembering that we were never outside of it to begin with.

And when everything becomes quiet, beneath the noise, beneath the fear, beneath all the names we give ourselves, there is simply this: a living thing, breathing on this earth, trying to love and be loved, trying to make sense of the light before it fades.

Perhaps the most beautiful thing about being human is that even knowing how temporary we are, we continue to plant seeds for a future we may never see.