Be a Human Being

A Resolution for the New Year

In a world saturated with screens and heading toward greater automation every day, here’s a New Year’s resolution to consider for the coming year: Be a Human Being.

Bit by bit, our modern world seems to be leeching the humanity right out of us. In the name of efficiency and ease (and profit for some), we are spending less time doing what humans do - moving, feeling, relating, caring - and more time acting like machines. Little by little, we are letting slip away all that matters most.

It’s unlikely that the number of screens and chatbots and online posts will diminish any time soon. We are most certainly heading toward a world run ever more by computer algorithms and less by human hearts. I don’t have an answer to this problem on a global scale, but I do know that as individuals we have a choice about how much we allow our lives to be mediated by glowing pixels and how much we live in real life.

In the coming year, let’s reclaim our humanity. Let’s spend more time with friends and less time with phones. Let’s get out into the world - bumping up against fellow humans - instead of chatting with bots and calling it a life. Let’s move our bodies, as bodies are meant to do. Let’s have feelings, even when they are ambiguous and uncomfortable. Let’s love abundantly. Let’s forgive and forget and move on. Let’s spend more time in nature communing with birds and flowers and trees and rivers - and less time staring vacantly at screens while sensing our vitality slowly slipping away.

Being a Human takes energy. Living well takes effort. Going against the grain of an increasingly commercialized world requires discernment, clear-seeing, intention and willpower. It’s so easy to lounge around in our easy chairs, scrolling through our screens in search of a sense of completion that never quite arrives.

Being a Human isn’t particularly comfortable or efficient. Our bodies age and ache. Our minds conjure endless possibilities and promises, and they occasionally tend toward confusion and forgetfulness. Our hearts long for uplift and contentment, yet find themselves aching from time to time. We try, we fail. We love, we struggle. We have moments of clarity and then confusion. We so easily get lost and we just want to find our way home.

And still, Being a Human is what makes life worth living and is worth protecting with every ounce of our attention. Being human means loving, caring, falling down and standing back up. Being human means seeing a need and mustering up the creativity and care to find a way to fill it. Humans conjure up lofty aims, and they sometimes meet them and often don’t. But the caring, the trying, the urge to make a difference matters either way. I don’t want to become a machine and I have a feeling you don’t either.

In the coming year, perhaps you’d like to join me in nurturing all the loveliness that makes us living, breathing human beings. In the name of love and connection, be willing to be uncomfortable. Spend your most precious human resource - your loving attention - on what matters most. Allow yourself to be fragile and imperfect. Make room for simple pleasures and bright joy. Let your heart love fiercely, even when you remember that nothing lasts forever. Our lives are always becoming something new, in beautiful and unpredictable ways.

Go outside every morning, even when conditions aren’t perfect. Start your day being willing to be a little bit uncomfortable in the name of vast skies and little creatures and morning light. Take a few deep breaths, remember that you are alive, and contemplate the ways you’d like to spend your vital energy in the day ahead. It’s always easier to see what matters most when standing in the morning light.

Live your life, earn your keep, feed your children, do a little good. And, whenever possible, choose humanity. Make time for the restless, the inefficient, the nonsensical. Sing out. Move your body. Bake bread, even if your loaves fall a little flat. Read a real book, one that you pull off the shelf and hold in your hands. Bring out the sketchpad and doodle, even - and especially - if you can’t even draw a tree.

Memorize a poem. Start a list of birds you can see from your kitchen window. Write down your happy moments on scraps of paper and tuck them into corners of the house where you’ll discover them when you need them most.

Remind yourself that you can be uncomfortable and still manage all that life throws your way. Widen your window of tolerance so that you can carry your heavy load and still stay on your feet. Consider that you can be happy even when you aren’t pleased. Human beings are able to bear a lot of discomfort, after all, in the name of loving the world.

Most importantly, regardless of how much of a hermit you might be, Be a Human in the company of others. Put yourself in places where you’ll bump into strangers or spot an old friend or maybe make a new one. Meet a friend for coffee. Buy books in real stores. Go to that 7 PM event, even when every bone in your body wants to stay home where it’s warm and comfortable.

Ask a friend to teach you how to paint a flower. Take a yoga class - in the real world, with real people. Sit down at the piano and pick out a tune you learned when you were eight. When given the choice, choose people over machines, togetherness over reclusiveness, and uplift over the empty feeling of sitting in the dark while scrolling through a never-ending stream of posts from strangers.

Here’s one of my very favorite gifts of being human: In the real world with a body and a mind and a generous heart, you are allowed to be imperfect and inefficient and perplexed. You can take the long and winding road, even if you’re a little late. You can be uncomfortable in front of crowds and speak your truth anyway. You can do dumb things and then, when you notice that pit in your stomach that tells you you’ve gone a bit astray, ask for forgiveness. You can be a person who forgives with generosity and ease. You can fail and learn and try again.

I want to live in a world where we wear mismatched socks by accident and forget our keys and ask strangers for help and offer help generously. I want to live a life where it’s okay to get lost from time to time, and where against all odds, we are found. I want to live in a world where we are allowed to cry and make mistakes and still remember how to make a joyful noise. I want to live in a world where surprises thrive and the capacity for wonder remains. I want to remember how to infuse tenderness and care into everything we do. And I want to live in a world where we love one another with abandon, not in spite of our fallibility but because of it.

I’ve made a list of all the ways in the year ahead I’d like to Be a Human Being (and Not Become a Bot), and I hope you might like to join me. Let’s tape our Be A Human lists to our refrigerators, set an intention every morning and see what happens. Let’s put down our phones and reach out to others. Let’s explore what lights us up. Let’s be humans, together.

We might forget. We might get lost. We’ll surely find ourselves sucked into our screens while eating popcorn alone in our pajamas on the couch from time to time. And then we’ll remember there is another way, another path we can take that allows us to be human and be whole, to live and love with tenderness and deep care. And we’ll put down our phones and pick ourselves up and head back into our very real lives, holding close to all that matters most.

No worries. Not a problem. We’re only human, after all.