205 – Humans v3

I dedicate this essay to my readers because these are your words from comments on my previous two essays about humans. All I did was edit, arrange, and attempt to provide a common voice. Because of the length, I divided it into two essays.

Click the video above for several minutes of background waves while reading.

I like to walk on the beach. It is good for the mind, body, and soul – and refreshing on my feet. 

Humans are the same because we all want to be safe, happy, and loved while wishing the best for our loved ones. We yearn for community, but DNA, culture, history, compassion, behaviors, communication, needs, life experiences, and much more connect us.

Everyone is a book with a unique story, but it is a book that weaves into the storyline of family members, neighbors, friends, colleagues, and more unknown people than we realize. 

Photo by Alexander Grey on Pexels.com

All of us are good and bad, happy and sad, kind and mean; plus much more. Everyone has joys, problems, successes, failures, dreams, fears, and worries. 

For better or worse, we are very random creatures – maybe the most random of all living things because our brains deliver individuality. We journey with no concrete purpose much of the time, but we find things that spur us into action. Most of us may not realize our complexity, but I think our ability to deal with randomness and structure drives the human ship. Then again, that’s the human brain at work.

We adapt and change our behavior based on external conditions and our internal landscape. We can rise above instinct, suppress fear, and react with reason, which steps outside our biological programming – but even the most placid of animals can unexpectedly turn. That does not make our dark sides right, but perhaps our dark behaviors are a kind of warped defense mechanism.

The human ability to ponder is a blessing and a curse. A curse because we often cannot find the peace that other creatures seem to enjoy – but we do not know their struggle. We judge everything based on our criteria. Well, that’s our selfishness coming through.

Photo by Wojciech Marciniak on Pexels.com

Sometimes I think the other animals are lucky because they aren’t so burdened with pondering about meaning and can live their lives without angst beyond survival – but perhaps they miss out on experiencing joy, creativity, problem-solving, and various forms of high-level communication.

We mostly learn about others through interactions, life experiences, and observation. Formal education fits in to help us establish our niche in the world – but we learn much more informally.

We organize ourselves into cultures and groups within a culture. Cultures with different languages, customs, foods, behaviors, traditions, laws, expectations, and more – yet we forget our shared commonalities and often side with selfishness. I would love to see humans treat all life as they would like to be treated.

We are unique and complex, but neither is an excuse for not being kind to each other. Greed, avarice, selfishness, and tribalism surpass decency. We need to all be more Human! As unique and complex as we are, it is that simple, but human stupidity makes it seem like we never will. 

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We are a wacky configuration of blessings, curses, rights, and wrongs – but in the end, what separates us most of all from the wild beasts is that we can mess up the lyrics to our favorite songs.

We need to learn to accept that we are the same but different. We are like works of art that others interpret but not in the same way – yet connecting the interpretation into the large jigsaw puzzle of the overview of life.

Our uniqueness has led each of us to many wonderful connections in life. I often think about the people I’ve met along my life journey who left a lasting impression on me; and helped me to be myself. This helped me learn and find my way – to pick up behaviors from others that I turned into new habits. I confidently say this is true for each of us.

There is no end to our ruminations about ourselves. Humans are many things – uniquely different from each other – uniquely different from other living things – yet we share much in common and the rest of life. But throughout all our plusses and minuses, we are worth thinking about. Maybe we should think about humanity more often. After all, I like to walk on the beach. It is good for the mind, body, and soul – and refreshing on my feet. 

See what other bloggers have posted about Humans

• Nature and Human Consciousness: No Separation (an essay)
• To Err is Human (a poem)
• How Writing Makes Us Human (an essay)
• Humans vs AI (a drawing)
• Human or Inconceivable (a poem)
• A Human Experience (a quote)

Next Post: Humans v4 – Saturday 25th November @ 1 AM (Eastern US)