More Fully Human

I have this post about my new job in the works, and I also really wanted to write about what I made for dinner tonight, but then I read this thing about belief that my beloved Linda wrote, and then I banged out about three pages of a big long explanation of how I got from fundamentalist Christianity when I was a kid to where I am now, with faith and spirituality, as a not-kid. But. I am not ready, even now, to write too much about all how I got here—but I’ll just tell you where here is, in terms of faith and spirituality, and one day maybe I’ll be able to be coherent about where here isn’t.

Anyway, I came up with four things that I think about lately, when I’m trying to figure out how to live my life or to decide what’s right or wrong. Usually I don’t boil things like this down into little sentence-sized chunks—usually, in fact, this is like a four hour, three-hot-chocolate conversation that you have to have with me, during which I roll my eyes and gesture expansively and pound the table and sometimes shake and sometimes cry. But since it’s a Saturday evening and I still haven’t done the dishes after the awesome dinner I made that I’m not going to tell you about, and also because I need to put my tube top on and go to a Bollywood dance party, you get the abridged version. This is what I think. Here’s where I am:

1) Treat other people the way you want to be treated

2) Do the best you can with the sense you have

3) Love as much as you can for as long as you can

4) Everything is going to be all right

Sometimes I call this type of thing, these attempts we try to make, “becoming more fully human.” I guess I think that that’s the purpose of life, if there is a purpose at all: to become more human, and that the above sentence-length bullet points (and the three-hot-chocolate concordance that goes with it, should you be so unfortunate to get me started on this if we happen to stopping at a café together) are ways you can sort of…get as much of the whole being-a-person thing as possible.

Because that’s what this is, right, that’s why we have religion and faith and belief and everything, it’s to help us live with one another, and maybe to help us live with ourselves, too. Life happens, every day, and it’s no big surprise by now that it’s way different than we thought it would be, that’s it’s more and harder and worse and better than we ever imagined. And it’s certainly more confusing, as well, I find, the further I go along and the older I get—me who wanted to be married by thirty, me who was afraid to go anywhere by herself, me who thought that if I prayed enough and raised my hands in the air high enough when I sang the worship songs that everything that was difficult and incomprehensible would magically make sense and that everything would…that I would…that something would happen.

And actually it turns out I was kind of right about that, that last part. Even though I don’t sing worship songs anymore something has happened, over and over again, something keeps happening, and I have to learn how to be human every single day of my life. I have to think about those four numbered sentences every day, I have to consciously choose awesome, and I have to fail, again and again. I still don’t even know what that means, really, trying to become more human, if there’s a reason for it, other than making the short time we have on earth more interesting and ourselves more generally pleasant to be around during that short time. Maybe that’s enough in itself.

I do secretly sometimes talk to God, still, and I secretly still really really hope that there’s a heaven…but even if there’s not, even if I’m just talking to my pillow late at night, even if no one is listening and we’re all finally and always alone– I think I’m just going to keep on trying. I’m going to try to treat people as well as I can, I’m going to try my best with the little sense I possess, I’m going to love with everything I have in me, and I’m going to attempt to trust that somehow, someday, everything is going to be all right. I’m just going to try to be as fully human as I can.

And hey, if you want to? You do it too, okay? Then we’ll all be in this together.