Wet Cement

I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts around what it means to be human and why I think it’s important that we stay in touch with that. Not as an act of defiance, but just because the world gets really noisy and complicated, and we can lose sight of the things that make us feel human in the first place.

We are living in uncertain times. But, of course we are. Were there ever certain times? I guess when things were certain-ly terrible. But for as long as we’ve been here… whether we crawled out of the water, or were pulled from the clay, whether we’re made from bone, or stardust… we’ve made it this far despite the odds. Human beings are funny creatures. We are slower than the cat, dumber than the rain, and weaker than our urges… but we are clever and driven, and our will to survive, our adaptability, is nothing short of spectacular.

And see what we can do. We make shelter and tools, we tell stories and create rituals. We sing, we dance, we paint on the walls of caves, we carve our initials in trees. (I kinda wish we didn’t do that last one.) We find a way to make our mark… even when we don’t know why.

We can’t make sense of the world, and sometimes I think the more we know, the less it makes sense… but we never stop trying. And when some of us finally come to a place where we consider the possibility that none of it actually means anything at all… we make the meaning ourselves. Which is a kind of nihilism I can get behind and even feel inspired and motivated by. Mourn our dead ad celebrate new life. We make promises, sometimes just to ourselves. We tell stories about where we came from. We fall in love even though it’s stupid and I hate it.

And for me, I just want to keep making things. I want to write my dumb songs, draw my dumb pictures, make someone laugh, make some memories, and stick my hands in wet cement (which I have yet to do.)

I want to show that I was here. It doesn’t answer the big questions, and there’s no point to it… but it’s good enough for me.