Mistakes and Weaknesses

Lately has been a complicated time for me. One of the things I have learned is that life is absolutely complicated, no matter how much we simplify it. It is complicated not just because of the other people in life, which is what is usually suggested by people. But life is also complicated because of what we are.

We are human. To be human is to be complicated in ways that your yourself don’t even understand. It is to be capable of great nastiness that you never even imagined. It is also to be capable of surprising amounts of forgiveness, of being resilient to a degree you have never imagined before, of being vulnerable in ways that you unconsciously very strenuously seek to hide from other people.

It is to make mistakes and to be weak and to be afraid of the most important things in the world. It is to love people who push you away, and it is to be loved by people who push you away despite themselves, too. It is sometimes to fail to overcome your fears, and sometimes it is to regret that failure.

To be human is to want anger to make things simpler and easier. It is to go ahead and do something that you think is crazy – let alone the fact that everyone else thinks it is crazy. It is to realize that very small things are very important, and big things matter much less than you imagine. It is to lie to yourself, and to other people, and not even know you are lying sometimes.

It is to hurt, and lose people and things that matter to you. It is to put your trust into the wrong effort, into the wrong people, and sometimes it is to be hurt by other people.

But being human is very occasionally to feel something you have never felt before. It is to realize that you can change the body that you live in. It is to realize that you have power in your decisions, and that life is absolutely full of decisions. It is to feel hope despite very good evidence that there is no reason to feel it. It is to be forgiving, especially towards oneself. It is sometimes to be a fool, and to realize there is absolutely nothing foolish in being what is called a fool.

What I have realized is that to love someone, in the real and true sense of the word love, is to be human. It is to live with all the weakness and crap and fear and the unrealized potentials, as well as the power and the hope and strange and perhaps unfounded joy that we sometimes find in ourselves at the most perplexing moments.

It is also to look into another person’s eyes, and see weakness and pain and most importantly fear, and to believe in and respect and want to be near that person anyway. And that is frightening, much bigger than us. It reminds us of our tiny size in the universe, of our insignificance. But I understand now, that this tapestry of potentialities, of meanings and complexity, is what makes us beautiful, and human.

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