What makes us human?
I was born human. That part required no effort from me.
What I’m still trying to understand is what, beyond biology, makes us human.
We often point to intelligence, technology, language, or what we have managed to build. I find myself more interested in things like curiosity, cooperation, compassion, imagination, restraint, and our ability to care about something beyond our own immediate survival.
I don’t know where that boundary really lies. Perhaps being human is less something we are, and more something we keep learning to practise.
Why help a stranger?
Some of my strongest feelings of belonging have come from surprisingly ordinary moments: helping someone through a problem and seeing the relief on their face afterwards.
There is a thought I keep returning to:
Someone I love may one day be another person’s stranger.
I would like to live in a world where people still step forward for one another when that happens.
Helping is not entirely selfless either. Every person carries experiences, knowledge, and ways of seeing the world that I don’t have. When I get close enough to someone else’s problem to help with it, my own world usually becomes a little larger too.
What do we owe the rest of life?
The more capable we become of understanding consequences beyond ourselves, the harder I find it to see intelligence as an entitlement to dominate.
Perhaps it should mean the opposite.
If we can understand that another species suffers, that an ecosystem is fragile, or that decisions made today will affect lives far into the future, then that understanding gives us the possibility of acting with care.
I sometimes think of that as custodianship.
I’m not certain that is the right word. But the question stays with me.
And what do I do with all of this?
Mostly, I keep thinking.
Sometimes I write.
Sometimes a question turns into an experiment, something I build, or a conversation with another person.
And sometimes it remains unresolved for years.
I’m increasingly comfortable with that.
This website is partly a place for those unfinished thoughts to live.