Our Humanness and Our Responses to Being Human

We are like other animals in many ways. We differ in our greater imagination which allows us to dream of things we haven’t experienced and even those which have never existed. Especially, we can dream of a better life for ourselves, our families, communities, nations and the world, now and for future generations.

We dream of intimacy, knowledge, power, beauty and permanence; but all of these dreams are limited by reality. As with love, each of our dreams brings pain, the pain that our dreams are not yet realized, may be difficult to realized, and if realized may become unrealized again. We live painfully in the jaws of reality with our dreams like teeth reaching upward and our limitations like teeth reaching downward. Our human life is a glorious struggle, glorious because we can dream and a struggle because our dreams are all limited.

Living within these jaws of dreams and limitations, we respond in four major ways to deal with our pain. These may be referred to as (1) trying to be more than human (God), (2) trying to be less than human, (3) trying to avoid failure by distinguishing what dreams can be realized, and (4) learning to live with the pain of dreaming.

To reduce the pressure of our jaws, we may try to eliminate the limitations (the upper teeth). We believe that we can realize any of our dreams if we work hard enough and smart enough. We diligently identify obstacles, make strategies and implement tactics. If failure occurs, we redo our plans and try harder. But inevitably at some point limits bring failure and great pain.

To reduce the pressure of our jaws, we may try to eliminate the lower teeth. We try to avoid dreaming. We try to escape dreaming through idle pastimes, mind altering substances, and other distractions. We argue that reality or God won’t let us achieve anything. We whine and moan about bad things happening to us. But trying to eliminate either the upper or lower set of teeth simply denies our human condition. We cannot avoid dreaming and eliminate our pain.

Another possibility which we try is to continually run back and forth across our teeth like a piano player trying to see which dreams we can realize and which we must forsake. We continually crank our pairs of teeth up or down. Like a sneak thieves, we try to see what we can get away with. Trying to avoid failure, we set quitpoints instead of milestones for our actions. When the going gets rough, we run away. Not being truly committed to our dreams, we only play at being human.

A fourth possibility is to too accept and embrace our human ability to dream, the limitations to realizing our dreams and the accompanying pain. We embrace our lives as a glorious struggle, being willing to endure necessary pain involved in pursuing our dreams. We view everything we do as an experiment which may succeed or fail.

A football player who throws his all into a play, which succeeds or fails, immediately releases the pain and throws his all into the next play, still strongly trying to win the game. Similarly we anticipate and attend to our pain, finding ways to release it, and move on to deal with our next moment. We take our dreams seriously, expect limitations and deal with the resulting pain.

Some of us may typically make one or another of these four responses. But we are all aware of all of them and have done all of them. By realizing how we are responding, we can make explicit choices. We can decide to be human, pseudo-human, less that human or more than human.

On tactic for dealing with our experiences and learning from them is to continually converse with a mythical god or meditative council about them. Exalt, moan, rage, accept, bargain, give thanks, ask for compassion, whatever, in response to most of our experiences, especially the surprises, both the miracles and the other kind. These exaggerated responses bring our pain and other emotions and our thoughts to consciousness, allows us to place them in the larger context of our understanding of our humanness and proceed with less baggage to our next experience.