How to be human

1. Look under your bed and find the box of childhood photos. Look under those photos and find your laughter and look under your laughter to find your inner child. Look under your inner child and find swingsets and look under the swingsets to find first kisses and under the first kisses are first heartbreaks and open up your first heartbreak to find your mom’s hands wiping away the tears from your cheeks and look under those hands to find a lifetime of sacrifices and broken promises. Open up the sacrifices and broken promises and find Sunday mornings and look under Sunday mornings to find the church pews and look under the pews to find hopeless devotion and in that hopeless devotion is a lost faithfulness that will follow you all the way into adulthood. Open up the faithfulness and find the ambiguity and the gift of what it is to be human.

2. Yearn. It is innate in us since the beginning of time, and there is no use in resisting it, no use in trying to separate the desire that has been written in the stars. An invisible string stretches taut across humankind, from us to those who have walked here before us, from the epic ages of Roman times to the modern day, where history does not repeat itself, but instead it rhymes. It tugs at us from the heart, but we feel it from the tip of our head to the soles of our feet. Our bones shudder as the wire is yanked from yesterday into tomorrow. We look at the vast expanse of what we do not have, and it’s like a curse to always want what we don’t have. 

3. Find a recipe to cook, something as simple as a sandwich or as extravagant as a croquembouche, and double the amount of cooking time. Wander down every aisle in the grocery store, examine the ripe peaches on display, even though they are not a part of the ingredient list. Walk the long road home; stop to smell the flowers and wave at the cat perched in the window. Play some jazz, let the sultry beat caress every corner of the kitchen. Take your time cutting and dicing and mixing and sauteeing and baking and plating and serving. Savour every bite. Let the tang of lemon and the brininess of the salt coat your tongue. Delight in the abundance of flavors, delight in how lucky you are to enjoy something as righteous as a home-cooked meal. 

4. Sit down on the floor of your bathroom. Tuck yourself into the space between your sink and your toilet, and let the cold tile bring you back into your body. And now, cry. Uncoil the grief and anger from inside your chest and cry it out until you ache. Cry for your mother, your father, cry for friends no longer, cry for the child you are not anymore. Cry to films, to songs and books, cry to poetry and paintings. Cry because you care, and if you do not, cry because you can not seem to bring yourself to do so. Cry by yourself and let the acoustics of the bathroom resonate with the pain you have endured. Cry with others, let them soak your shirt with tears, and do unto them as they have done unto you. Cry into shoulders and into chests, cry into your hands and into the crook of your elbow. Never let the tears linger unshed in the back of your eyes, and no matter how much you swallow, the lump in the back of your throat will not disappear unless you cough out the sadness deep inside your bones. 

5. Notice everything you find joy in. Turn it into a ritual. The simple act of mixing sugar into your mug of coffee in the mornings. Label it, make it part of your routine. Make it part of your myth, your legacy. The walk you take after dinner every night, the one where you have to slip in between the chain link fence to reach the quiet path that allows you to stare at the stars in the sky. Let it only be meaningful to you. 

6. Realize that you are lost. Recognize that you are at a fork in the road, constantly, and let the confusion overwhelm you. Never be completely sure of the direction that you are going in, but remember that every step you take, every pebble you kick, and every flower you pick is meant for you. 

7. Laugh, always. When you’re happy, when you’re angry, when you’re grieving. Never stop laughing. Find it in everything. 

8. There is someone you love. There are things that you love. There are languages that you know. Learn how to express this love to them, for these things. Scour the depths of your brain for words you may have lost, bookmark the ones you already know; do not rush, but do not draw out this task longer than you have to. Find those words, the exact ones that show how you feel, and string them together. Edit, rework, remove, and revise these words. Enunciate them. Feel them in your mouth, let them bend in between your teeth, and scrape your gums. Feel the solidity of them against your tongue. Do not let them be elastic. These words, they are not meant for anyone or anything else other than what it is exactly that you love. And once you know these words, write them down. Say it out loud. Do not lose them to time, and do not let them serve any other purpose. 

9. Forget. Not everything, but some things. Not all memory is meant to be immortal. Some emotions, some recollections, do not need to arrive in the same way anymore. Forgetting is not a weakness. It is how you will remain strong. 

10. Return to nature. Always find your way to your roots, the essence of mankind. No matter how far you go from it, come back to nature. Let it be an exercise in muscle memory. When the smell of grass begins to slip from your grasp, when you can no longer remember the feeling of the sun on your skin and the soil in between your toes, return to nature to remember who you are. Do not let yourself disappear into the wires and mechanization of the future. Return to nature, be human. 

“You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky