Heavy

After a heavy weekend, I enjoyed some light entertainment tonight: steak and ice cream. 

My yoga teacher on Friday talked about us as "human beings". Sometimes we need some lightness to relax and just "be". She said we focus too much on doing, doing, doing, and I have to agree. In our north american society we grow-up thinking that this is what makes us human. We created the world we know now and we keep creating and recreating it. There is so much energy being spent making that sometimes I fear there won't be any space left to breathe. Sometimes I feel like there is so much mindless doing that I feel numb and this is when I question what separates us from animals. Animals don't have emotions, they don't think about their next creation, what they're going to do next to improve themselves, where they want to be in 5, 10, 20 years, what they have to have done in their lives. Animals just are. My dog is always very happy to see me, and yesterday I told him is was especially nice to see him too because I knew all he thought about was eating, pooing, walks, and playing. It's a depressing thought to think that maybe all this doing is all that makes us human. 

But we have emotions. We can be happy or sad, we love and hate, etc. But when there's none of that, what do we do? When we're numb and suffocated by all the doing, how do we know we're still human? How do we know we won't suddenly start walking on four legs and have to run after our food?

It's difficult to "be" sometimes, because it isn't tangible. You can't work at being, you can't study being, you can't sketch being, or practice it. You just have to accept it. But accepting something you can't explain or understand is very difficult, similar to accepting god. Some people will tell you "He just is".

But I realised recently that we're conscious of life whether we like it or not. That also makes us human. We're conscious of our being alive and how that is. We may have forgotten why, but we always know how. We have control over it. We always have control over our lives, whether we feel like we do or not. We are always controlling our lives. We're keeping ourselves alive.

But this is what animals don't know. For them, it is instinct. But we understand it.

It's easy to forget what makes us human. There are times when we feel like less than animals. Like machines. So when you feel like a machine from all the time you've spent doing, when you stop doing, what do you feel like then?

What separates us from machines? The fact that we are alive. That's when we're being, and not doing. 

Now how do we bring ourselves back to feeling human again? By realising that we know this is a depressing place to be. We could recognise this as an emotion. 

We could then call upon other feelings. Feelings like happiness, and love. And we could start small. We could start with steak and with ice cream. And then we could move on to music. And then we could move on to people.