“I am human. I am a human being, and it is hard.
It is hard being a human being; to keep on being human, knowing what being human is.
It’s a curse in perpetuity, humanity and all its entailments; the endless state of “human being” and “being human” because even when you go the whole six feet under, the fact that remains is that you were human and did human things.
It is an eternally existing fact that strictly determines how the eternal existence of eternity is endured.
We are human, human beings because each day we are being humans. You live life and through it all, there you are- human and being.
It is exactly because of this recurrence of being human and human beings that we needed someone to “unbe” our human beingness and instead be as He is.
Above humanity.”
One day, as I lay on my bed preparing to sleep, I wondered and asked myself, “What makes you alive?” I looked back to myself and rolled my eyes in my socket, searching and looking as if the answer was somewhere around me; as fleeting, covertly overt and as invisibly visible as an annoying mosquito flying about. I could hear its nagging whistle and sound, and that sound led me to it. It flew right past me and I looked for it, as it had disappeared again, but I could still hear it. My eyes darted one way as my hands clapped suddenly, adding to the annoying mosquito sound, the buzz from my hands hitting themselves together. I opened them as they burned and tingled red, but no mosquito was flattened between them. Somewhere around me it had escaped. One second. Two seconds and a third, and the nagging and annoying whistle and sound resumed, as in reaction I gritted and gnawed my teeth.
Each time I revolved the question like a coin between my pondering and intellectual fingers, I realized two things; I desperately wanted to be alive and know this, and secondly, I wanted to feel life and living and the blood course through my veins to know it. Since the answer felt like it lingered and lingers still, so closely yet continues to evade me so quickly, I decided I would die to find out. I would know I was alive, if I died.
But what if I wasn’t? What if I wasn’t alive, so that when I pulled the trigger to the revolver in my mouth, nothing happened, because I was and am already dead? I paused in a sort of limbic hijacking with no clue what to do; yet in myself I felt I knew the answer and how to prove it. Like the annoying mosquito buzzing around my head at night time, I longed to clap that answer between my hands and so prove its existence, because of an even greater longing to close my eyes and sleep. I wondered and asked myself again, “What makes you alive?” I looked back to myself and said sadly, I don’t know. I held my head between my hands and wept. I cried myself to sleep and then I dreamed.
In my dream, someone like myself asked me, “How do you know you are dreaming?” I looked back to someone like myself and answered, “Because I am asleep.” Someone like myself asked again, “How do you know you are asleep?” I answered, “Because my eyes are closed, and my breathing is calm and even. I am asleep because I know I am.” Someone like myself sighed deeply and with a finality asked again, “How do you know?” I looked back to someone like myself and realized I didn’t. I began weeping until I cried myself awake.
Then I started looking for the mosquito. I needed to find it. If I found it, I would sleep soundly.
The process begun and I searched for its buzzing sound;
It is because I think that it is only logical that one knows something best, in a context of contrast, that comes from the absence or presence of its extreme opposite. It is also because I know that conviction provides hope, and hope saves. The more important question I should ask myself is “What do I know?” instead of pining that I don’t truly know it. For if I know it, then there is no possibility or at best there exists only a much slighter one, that I indeed, do not. If I know it, how I came to know about it, doesn’t change the fact that I do, and doesn’t make what I know more or less false, or true.
I then heard the mosquito buzz towards the left and lifted the light in that direction;
I believe it is in extremes that we understand others; in pain that we understand joy, and in hunger that we know what to have food is, and so on. In the same way, it is possible that I can know life only in death. When I am dead, then I can know what it means to be alive. It is when you lack one thing that the need for the other thing so needed is amplified and felt. Just imagine drowning; it is in that moment you can’t breathe anymore that you truly appreciate breath. You understand the process so well, in that moment, suddenly is some sort of bursting clarity. You instinctively recall that your heart and brain keep you alive in working together and in that moment, you must get to inhaling and exhaling so as to continue living. When you finally get to the surface and gasp for air, somehow the lens through which we see life is much, much clearer. Is the reason for existence, being alive? Isn’t that what everyone spends their life in search of? Why everyone must live? Why can’t we just be alive? The basic and overriding instinct of the inward philosophies and rumblings of each mind and heart, is to live and not just be alive.
Since you can also only know what makes you alive when you are dead, mustn’t you die to live? Therein achieving the understanding of what truly makes you alive and living?
Is not life then death? Isn’t death then life?
Then the mosquito flew right before my eyes!
I have died and therefore, this is what I will prove to show I know I’m alive. I died the day I was born; the day I bore the flesh of humanity and felt the wound that makes us all the same. I died the day I could look deep inside myself and see what was there. I could feel it and I burned with shame. I died when I saw it in others. I died when I became afraid of myself and others. I died when I realized that I don’t know who I am. I die when I see that my country doesn’t know or perceive that we were meant to live for so much more. Death is always knocking on our doors and barging in. Not to haunt us, not to frighten us even if we might be, but in the providence of something so much greater, remind us of life. I know I am alive, because I die every day. The day I stop dying is the day I stop living.
I let out a sigh of release in landing my feet on this plane of understanding. My feet could move and I was no longer stilled in panic. My mind vibrated with understanding and brought to mind all those times I had died. In hindsight, I looked back and saw that I was alive with every failure and quest and expedition and heart break and despair and pain and wandering. I saw that the joys and triumphs and love and hope came after that, and only after that. I looked presently at all my hardship that carried with it, the looming of death and I embraced them. I dived into my fears and faced them face to face and they were vanquished. I accepted my despair and lifted my eyes to the hills in search of help from whence I realized where my help cometh. I realized that not all who wander are lost. I dug my tired heels into the earth of this plane and run. I run wildly as I understood with myself that I was alive.
I am alive.
There, the mosquito was smeared across my hands. Dead.
I lay my head back and slept smiling in joy to myself, for in a strange way I had died in that very moment to live.
And I was content. Content to suffer. Content to die.
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