Being Human
When we speak of someone “being human”, we usually mean one of two things. The first is to make mistakes. “I’m only human,” people will say, when they’ve failed or messed up or inadvertently misread a situation. After all, to err is human, as the saying goes. To be human is to confront a limitless universe with understanding, faculties, abilities, strengths and powers that are paralyzingly limited. Humans are born less developed and take longer to attain anything remotely resembling independence than almost any other animal. It is easy to find countless examples of animals who can see the world better than we can, hear it, smell it, taste it, touch it better than we can. There are even animals that can see or feel electricity or magnetic fields or temperature variations and have many other senses that we don’t have. We stumble through the world half blind and half deaf doing the best we can and generally making a mess of things. We make mistakes because we are human. We are human because we make mistakes. The second meaning of “being human” is having compassion. We urge people who are cruel or indifferent to “be human for once”, or “have a little humanity.” Making mistakes and having compassion are both equally what it means to be human, because you can’t truly feel or show compassion unless you are intimately acquainted with making mistakes. A strong person may feel pity for the weak. They may look down and feel sad that those weak fools keep stumbling around, bumping into the same walls over and over again. But they cannot feel compassion unless they know what it is like to be weak themselves. On the TV Show The West Wing, the character Leo tells a story “This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up,”Hey You. Can you help me out?” The Doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The Priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by, “Hey, Joe, It’s Me. Can you help me out?” And the Friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” The Friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.” To have compassion is to recognize that we are all attempting to make the best of it while usually ending up making the worst of it. To have compassion is to be patient when someone steps on our toes because we know that they feel bad because whenever we’ve stepped on someone’s toes, we felt bad. To have compassion, to be human, means choosing to be curious rather than choosing to be offended. To be human means taking a moment to flip the turtle off its back when we see its little legs pumping in the air. And then to go back and flip it over again a few minutes later when it’s got itself stuck again. To be human means jumping down in the hole and showing our friend the way out. To be human means that, while we are generally short-sighted and short-tempered and are better at making each other more miserable than less, we can nevertheless occasionally see past the beam in our own eye and the mote in our brother’s eye and lean on each other long enough to stagger forward a few steps further than we’ve ever gone before. We may be born some of the weakest and most helpless creatures on earth, but we have risen to be the dominant life form on the planet because we never stop being human. As much as we would like to, we just can’t seem to help but make mistakes, constantly and tirelessly and inevitably. And somehow we always manage to forgive and to reach out with love and compassion to help those in need more often and more readily and more easily than we think is wise or sane or even possible. We are beings of failure and forgiveness, mistakes and mercies, corruption and compassion, losses and loves, messes and majesties, weakness and wonder. To err is human, but to forgive is human also. When we see someone “being human” and doing something stupid, let’s “be human” also and forgive them.
