The Human Conundrum

(Water lily, pond in front of The Jewel Box, Forest Park-St Louis-Sept 2010)

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
William Wordsworth (quote etched into stone of Jewel Box entrance)

The hardest part of being human is learning to be human. The world is a scary place, with its millions of death inducing travesties that could befall any one of us at any moment, like choking on a pea, developing cancer, or having an aneurysm before we even have a chance to die of old age. If we're lucky enough to be born to halfway decent parents, we may have a chance to grow up expecting that people have the capacity for trustworthiness and our environment has the potential for safety.

The world is a beautiful place, that inspires deep thought and delight to spur us on to greatness. Nevertheless, the world and its people are broken enough that before most of us hit puberty, we've already layered on thickly innumerable coping mechanisms and beliefs about what it means to be human in order to protect ourselves from, and understand better, vast uncertainty.

Undoing these crusty layers is hard work. Like Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when he scratches and peels away his own dragon scales only to find another layer underneath, removing the shells we build around our hearts is maddening. It takes an incredible amount of effort to keep ourselves open to love from other people, God, and to garner the strength needed to choose to love other people. Instead of walking through life expressing our sorrows or even laughter, it is easier to choose hardness.

Don't:
care too much
think too much
love too much
get too close
be so sensitive
laugh too much
cry too much
dream too much
be too angry

The irony is, that if we didn't care, think, love, connect, feel, laugh, cry, dream, and get angry, we would be more like trees, or robots...or dead.