8,208,329,823* ways to be human
what's yours?
*As of March 2, 2025.
Then add 1 million ancestors per person behind every single one of us 8.2 billion... That’s a lot of human.
8.2 billion people with their own universes of experiences, identities, religions, ages, eye colors, preferences on mustard (where/when/how much/what flavor/on what/never/often), political ideologies, accessibility needs, inheritances, migration patterns, social media presences, sexual preferences, political positions, vocations, coping mechanisms, opinions on death/afterlife, relationships to the moon…
Every life, a universe.
And one of many mesmerizing aspects of this to me is that every single minute, every one of us 8.2 billion people is changing. So if we were to intercept time and take a snapshot of the realities of 8.2 billion people at 8:52 pm on March 2, 2025… by 8:53 pm it would all be different. Whether radical or subtle. As in: how many people were born between 8:52 and 8:53? How many died? How many missed their flights? How many had an unusual encounter? How many got handed a free ticket to a concert and took it? How many read an article that irrevocably shifted their opinion on an issue? How many received a life-changing piece of information? How many remembered something long forgotten? Just between 8:52 and 8:53.
Sometimes I really, truly let myself consider this: “There are 8 billion ways to be human.” And it surfaces a few things:
AGENCY + LACK OF CONTROL: I get to be human how I want to be human (it should go without adding: I believe this “want” must be held within a universally ethically/morally reverential framework). I get to be one of 8.2 billion people living my own life. Living the only life I can. I get to play with this concept of being my human self infinite ways. I get to explore what it’s like to be a victim, or to want to be a savior. I get to play with blame and acceptance and self-righteousness and surrender. I get to detach from all stories I’m making up to make life more palatable, survivable even, and instead, embrace everything as a lesson my soul is seeking in this lifetime to make life more exquisitely mysterious and fulfilling. Then I get to increase my ability to consciously choose and co-create my human experience in an infinite dance with both complete lack of control and complete accountability. Everyone is playing with agency + surrender differently. Some are living in black + white fatalistic/deterministic conditions. I’m increasingly healing my shadows and wounds so that I can more comfortably and consistently live in the nondualistic grey of endless paradox. Whew!
RELATIONALITY + SEPARATENESS: It’s extremely conceptually overwhelming to be in tune with the implications of coexisting on this planet with this many people. We are alone as ONE! of 8 billion and we are together as 8 BILLION!! We are atomized and we are organismic. We are individuated and inseparable. We are constantly journeying along the spectrum of belonging and independence, compromise and autonomy, interactivity and isolation… in a world that has intense agendas organized around entrenched paradigms of power and beliefs about core concepts of social formation (like the rigidity of nation states, or arbitrary hierarchies based on uncontrollable realities like skin color or heritage or country of origin, or the unwieldiness of a globalized financial economy predicated upon tremendous and unprecedented amounts of debt — not only fiscal but a hefty debt is owed to our precious Earth). We are all in flux and flow with our relationships to cohabitation. We migrate along the spectrum of self-conscious accounting of ourselves to selfless exploration of others. Ultimately, the simple existence of *others* always interrupts the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. We can’t control anyone. As Judith Butler said, “we're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.” Whew!
COMPLEXITY & SIMPLICITY: Consciously and unconsciously, reality has become extremely complicated. We’ve developed a particularly extravagant way of living on this planet — and I don’t mean luxurious, I mean… a lot. Just a lot. Stuff. So much stuff everywhere for everything. There are a lot of us making a lot of things in all dimensions. Because we are human, I humbly believe we actually all have some degree of cellular memory that links to all memory of human history imprinted within us — however perceptive to that we are. So, it’s totally plausible that you once knew, I mean in your bones, what it felt like to live a much simpler existence on this Earth for better or worse. At this point in human evolution, life is dense. The entire planet full of universes is theoretically accessible in our hands at any given moment. So many of us are calling for simpler realities. I know I am. I’d like to live on the Garden of Eden with my fellow Earthlings in peace and collective abundance and wellbeing with the most mutually beneficial, symbiotic advancements in technology and science to serve life and love, along with the beauty of our creative expressions free from the confines of commodification. Reciprocity instead. Enoughness instead. Safety instead. That’s it, really. Is that a lot to ask? Whew!
ARTISTRY: As you can tell, I have quite an intense way of being with all of this – a constant self/other-analysis always churning in my mind. This has been something I’ve struggled with since I was young. WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS?! I didn’t know I was asking that question then, but I was deeply tormented by a lot of what I saw of humanity at such an early age. And I felt so supremely emotionally alone, that it knotted into a pretty strangling way of existing here. But this is also what makes me an artist. And it’s what makes you an artist too. Some of us are pursuing this as our primary devotion and the central framework of our lives (like me), but everyone is an artist. Because we all have an acute sensitivity to the prismatic dimensionality of being human — because that’s one of our main jobs here I think. To take it in somehow (some, not the impossible all-ness of it, whatever parts we can, maybe our own lineages, maybe a theme like grief, maybe… flowers or goats or law or aerospace…) and make something beautiful with it, something in service to greater wholeness. Which takes us back to #1: how conscious we are determines the choicefulness of our lives. What are we making? What are we conjuring? Where is that coming from? Is it harming because it’s riddled with a lot of unprocessed material? We can raise goats or write books in ways that are either sacred or destructive… how awake are we in the act?
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
―James Baldwin
Here we are, coexisting with the busying minds and the wondering hearts and curious souls of 8+ billion of us who decided to check things out in/on/through/with Earth School for a while. And ultimately, how to be human is the core organizing question of our reality.
Everything stems from that. Everything returns to that.
Sadly, I think one of the most painful explorations of this question is looking at every other human from a comparative, judgmental lens our society is obsessed with and asking: how can I be like that human?
But…we’re asking a lot of important questions of our humanity:
How can humans behave better with other humans? What kind of human am I with more-than-human beings? What is my human being meant to do here? What did my human being come here to learn? How can I be a more _____________ human?
fulfilled
grounded
healthy
creative
resourced
safe
loved / loving
connected
conscious
courageous
…
For better or worse we interact with this unifying and fractalizing question (how to be human) every second we’re breathing (and depending on your beliefs about the afterlife or the beforelife or whatever we are when we’re not in bodies… we’re asking it then too sometimes).
Experimenting, expanding, questioning, integrating, evolving.
How to be human is one of the most humbling questions one can ask.
There is an idea that “God” or however you relate to that (Source, the Universe, Oneness, Mother Earth…) created people to have relationships, to be not only the observer but to also be observed. That God themselves wanted life forms with enough consciousness to play back, to respond, to share the Universe with intelligent capacity to be aware of that bigger fact, to bear “this” with God, to companion God… I don’t know how I feel about God, but I do think this is a beautiful contemplation.
Someone recently explained their enthusiasm about science fiction with me as: it’s the genre that’s asking “why is the Universe quiet?” when we know it can’t possibly be. Whew!
Look, it’s harder than ever to write publicly these days about everything.
It should be, in a more complicated world (see #3), where nearly everyone now has a microphone, video camera, and viewing screen to nearly everyone else and the democratization and globalization of access to one another comes with full-spectrum intensity – everyone can be a journalist, everyone can be a spokesperson, everyone can be a “source”, everyone can be an influencer… etc...
Anyway, I don’t fully know what this piece is about, to be honest. The truth is, I’ve been playing with my consciousness. That, perhaps, is my primary devotion. What is the level of my consciousness? Where am I closing? Where am I opening? Where am I judging? Where am I dancing with the universe instead of resisting it? Where am I telling stories when I can just be the observer? Where am I guarded against life? Where does my compassion want and need to grow?
The truth is, I’m unsettled in my desires for my life (like wanting to be a mother) and I’ve been struggling with big questions around my relationship to worry and anxiety and chronic avoidance and… it’s a lot… it’s heavy on me. And I’m continuously reprogramming my mind toward presence and gratitude without bypassing.
The truth is, I finished my book. And wow. It asked the most of me. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I’m so proud of it. And as I refine and refine and refine it to perfection, I know the book has a life of its own now. It’s complete enough to take on its own agency. And I am the mother who once had the baby in the womb all to myself, and now the baby is Earthside and everything is possible. (Ok I guess I’m a mother in one very important way.) Everything. All possible forms of interactivity and impact and longevity and fatality are possible for this being. And I’m in a version of the void, and there is a grief here. There is a reckoning here of what it meant and what it can / will mean.
Anyway. I’m just with it all, beaming out to you in this little way.
Thank you for reading. There’s a lot out there and you chose this. I treasure that.
Til next time, with gigantic love,
Rachel
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