The Human Journey

People tend to focus on the things that separate us. What separates us from the animals, or what separates Americans from Mexicans, men from women, old from young, rich from poor. It seems to be a part of our nature as humans to define ourselves by distinguishing features. I am many things, and I can use descriptors like male, White, American, middle-aged, middle-class, and so on. Yet at the heart of it, I never forget that I am and have been a living being above all else, it's the one description that has been true from the first moment and will be until the last.

Don't get me wrong, I find differences fascinating, and one of the most dubious claims I hear is people that say they don't notice those differences, as in "oh I don't see race". Of course you do, the first thing we notice are the external features of someone, whether they are male or female, old, young, or somewhere in the middle, their physical build, the color of their hair, and certainly their race and ethnicity as best we can determine it. Differences in appearance and attitude make the world go round, life would be quite boring if we all looked, felt, and acted the same. But underneath it all we are of the same piece and on the same journey.

Each of us has his or her own story, and that personal narrative is but a tiny piece in the larger mosaic that makes up the world, or at least the small part of the world that we are able to comprehend and describe. I suppose there is a central paradox at work, that no matter how small our presence in the vast universe we yet have some sort of impact on the overall shape of it, but at the same time it goes on its course regardless of how we behave or what we think. Events and places and people that we have no knowledge of have no meaning to us, but that doesn't prevent them from having their own meaning, just as our own lives, while full of importance to us are as yet of no relevance to those who have no knowledge of us.

Especially in our modern society, we tend to get caught up in material aspects of life, in appearances, in what separates us from others. We often become obsessed with the future or fixated on something from the past, and perhaps forget to live in the moments of the present. We always want what is just outside of our grasp and often fail to appreciate what we have within our reach. We want answers and explanations, and we fool ourselves into believing that we as humans have advanced to the point where we can grasp those answers. Maybe we should spend more time asking questions and less time worrying about conclusions, more time enjoying the present and less time worrying about what's to come, or what we could have done differently. Perhaps wherever we are on the journey is exactly where we are supposed to be, and no matter how hard we try, we have no of knowing what will come next.

It takes a great leap of faith to accept where you are in life, and it almost requires a renunciation of ego and arrogance to recognize that at the heart of it, we are not really so different from one another, or for that matter even from the animals. From the earliest times of the historic era humans have put themselves on a pedestal, the ancient Greeks proclaimed how great are the wonders of man. And the next logical step was to categorize man, to divide into groups and to proclaim that this group is better than another. Whether based on gender, ethnicity, language, age, nationality, religion or other differences, we seem to never be at a loss to rank ourselves, and we are pretty generous when it comes to ranking our own groups and much less so when it comes to others. We then perceive the world around us in a way that allows us to highlight those actions and beliefs that prove our preconceived notions, or prejudices, and ignore or mitigate those factors that would disprove our theories. I wonder how our lives and the world at large would be different if we were able to become truly enlightened and were able to let go of many of our accepted notions and see the world on a more visceral level, the way that I for one think our creator intended us to see.