On Being Human

The last two months were not easy time. I know it is a cliche, but in retrospect, it is blessing in disguise that I gained a little bit more clarity on being human and how we can do better knowing that.

Plans were disrupted. Difficult decisions had to be made. Most importantly, a number of intense emotions were felt, making me questioning many things during the period. Some thoughts have always been on my mind but particularly intense in the past months, for example:

• Feeling overwhelmed by the ever increasing level of responsibility;
• Feeling disappointed with the quality of my output;
• Feeling worried about the uncertainty (esp. any bad fortune), and many more similar.

At first glance, they appear to be different issues. But as I meditate on them, I see the biggest problem to be how I perceive or make sense of them. They are not as detrimental and outproportioned the level of attention I gave. They are all referring to valid issues, but they are also natural, normal and human. It’s human because almost everyone feel these emotions in one way or the other. Our biology and psychology are wired to give these signals autonomously to remind us things. Giving the issuess outproportioned attention only leave you less attention to fix them.

There was also the urge to fix the issues, right now right here and fully resolved. But in modern society, the issues we have are getting more complex in nature, having an oversimplified conception often only drives one to pick a bad direction. Recently I listened to a podcast where the guest described a phenomenon that made me ponder over: “Fame and fortune are the secular heaven; legacy now becomes the afterlife… [people think like] there’s no more problem when you’re rich and famous”. It is human to fantasise a future where there are no problems at all, but it isn’t possible. And we should see things for what they are in order to guide us to pick a solution.

NASA released the first images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. While fascinating, these images reminded me again of how tiny humans are when we think of the whole universe. Each of us is a tiny part of the Earth; the Earth is just one of the planets in the Solar System; the Solar System is just some dot in the whole universe.

It is humbling to think about the time and the place we occupy relative to the universe. Thinking with a view from above gives us the perspective, and this perspective gives us the patience to do things right.