I Don't Know How To Do This

a string of thoughts on being human

I worked to control sobs as I attempted to eat my yogurt this morning. I’d just learned that an author I love lost her dog. I saw a picture of a baby’s hand pressed against a window in Ukraine with a headline about taping up windows to avoid blast damage. I watched a video of someone dancing on a beach to connect back to the land and themselves.

I don’t know how to do this.

Being human has always been difficult—beautiful, odd, inspiring, and difficult.

We are born, we try to find our way, we bully or get bullied, we forgive and don’t forget, we love, we hate, we endure trauma, we heal or bury grief, we dance and sing, on and on until the end of this life as we know it.

I can’t make much sense of it. When my dear friend Rachel died a few years ago, I didn’t know how to grieve. I faced feeling nothing at all, watched sad movies…I once threw a bag of coffee beans against a wall and then swept them up after I’d cried, which led to a long and much-needed nap. A month later I was in Cape Cod recording an audio book, and there, I talked a lot with the ocean.

When I hurt, what comforts me most is that the world has seen this all before, all this human loss and grief, and holds a steadiness that I don’t understand. During that stay in the Cape, sometimes the waves hushed my thoughts completely, and sometimes they let me weep against their noise. When they’d calm, I’d calm, gathering words to the deepest parts of myself. I wrote poetry there.

We often write poetry and paint and dance when we feel as if we are dying.

Yesterday we went to the woods. We hiked, letting the soft chill of the air cool our lungs. We walked and I snapped photos of lichen and icicles, crocuses and the river. It will never, ever get old, the way the seasons keep a revolving door churning around us, through us. We cannot escape the magic of Mother Earth’s cycles, and why would we?

My greatest fear is an afterlife without Autumn.

We drove home and I took a short nap. I downloaded the BBC world news app on my phone because it is more helpful to me than Twitter is sometimes—it doesn’t produce the same level of anxiety and overwhelm in my body.

I check the news nearly hourly, trying to temper the grief and worry with medicine like walks in the woods, while recognizing that those who suffer at the hands of autocrats and dictators don’t always get walks in the woods. They are taping windows and hoping for a better season. They are leaving home, or trying to as they are forced to stay.

I don’t know how to do this. But knowing and embodiment shape one another, so the body keeps going.

We still go to the store for toilet paper and vegetables, and the dogs still need walking and the kids still need to play—just like us. To play.

bell hooks wrote, “The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be.” So, somehow, dreaming and truth-telling must go hand in hand. And in times of war (which have always been in one way or another) we temper dreams and medicine-words with fear, resolve, solidarity, and listening to the ocean.

Maybe being human means we know how and have no idea how, all at the same time.

And right now, that must be enough.