Humanity // and Other Impossible Burdens

Lately, I’ve had this word echoing in my head, banging away like some distant drum in the dark. Like so many things, it’s drowned out by the white noise of everyday life. I busy myself with projects and people and profession and I hear nothing. But in the quiet moments it creeps back into my periphery.

Humanity. It rests, cold and clinical, among my thoughts, in the same way one might leave an unsolved Rubik’s cube sitting on a desk. Humanity… already an elusive idea - and so complicated by the mere naming of it! A word demands definition, after all. A thing, in order to be, must be something… right?

Is it compassion? Is it love? Is it goodness? If it is any of those, then surely it must be other things too - I’m cynical enough to know ignorance, hatred, and cruelty… and to be honest, most of the time those feelings seem more real to me. They are at least as real as the others.

I’ve had a new project lately. I’m trying to learn the names of everyone who works at my local coffee shop; I go there all the time to read my book, so I see them often. I want to be more familiar with them; I want to be able to ask how their day is going and get a genuine response. I want them to be happy when I walk in because they recognize a friendly face.

It’s… weirdly hard for me. I often feel like I’m bothering them, like I have no business talking to them and they can tell. Surely they’re too busy - merely engaged in the niceties of customer satisfaction and forced pleasantry. But that’s what I always assume, and I can’t always be right. So I try anyways and hope I’m wrong.

Is that humanity? Is it my habits, my routines? My limits? Is it this system I’ve built and now run unconsciously, cyclically? Or is humanity something better, something other? Is it out there, hidden, in a fog, waiting to be found? Is it up to me to find it?

I feel sometimes like I can have only brief moments of lucidity, truly rapturous moments where the fog lifts and everything makes crystalline, terrifying sense, and the rest of waking life seems totally insignificant by comparison. These moments often arrive late at night when I’m alone, working or writing, lost in thought. They’re wonderfully inspiring and they never last.

But, for an instant, I get it. I totally get it. Without judgement, without inhibition, or remorse, or fear, I get it. And the feeling is so strong I want to rip it out of my chest with my bare hands.

I love you. My god, I love you so much it hurts. I can’t take it. I just want you to be happy, more than anything, and if I could give my life right now in exchange for your safety and your love and your happiness I would do it, and I would do it again and again, for every human life, a million times over and a million times after that, until the world is old and broken and full of sorrow and my effort is as meaningless and insignificant as an insect bracing for a great wave. I wouldn’t want your thanks. I wouldn’t want your thoughts or your prayers or your grief. I wouldn’t even want you to know my name. And it still wouldn’t be enough and I still wouldn’t deserve any better. And I would still do it gladly.

So, I sit here and I just… feel that. And it’s crushing. It’s so much more than I can take. I want to cry and laugh and dance and disappear. And then I break. I don’t want to lose this feeling. I want it to change me. I don’t want to be cynical forever. But in a moment it will all be over. I’m already breaking, and breaking is forgetting. I’ll be feeling my usual self in no time.

But I won’t forget all of it. I promise to take a piece of it with me. Maybe that’s all I can do.

I’m gonna go for coffee tomorrow morning, and I promise to learn someone else’s name. I hope they’re having a good day.