“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Today, I hate the human experience. Today I curse the day I decided to take form in this body, live this life. Why? What possessed me to come and do this now? Again?
I want to disappear. Vaporize into pure spirit. Go back to the before. I want to float out of my body and drift weightlessly, boundlessly free of the emotions that surge through it.
I desperately want to unite with the all-encompassing bliss I was lucky enough, once – just once – to feel after a weekend spiritual retreat. The warming, flooding perfect joy that shuts out all else; that is pure love, or God, or whatever you choose to call it. I want THAT again. Now. But it eludes me.
Today after my husband finds fault with me yet again after I feel I’ve tried so hard to change I feel like giving up. Today after my business isn’t where I want it to be after six years I feel like throwing in the towel. Today after yelling at my kid who doesn’t seem to appreciate the mothering I actually do have time to do I feel like “why bother?”
I’m not even the suicidal type. No way I’m running the risk of offing myself only to have to come back one more time and repeat the same lessons. No, I’m too rational for that. And too smart. And very chicken.
Today I feel like a raging failure. Today I can almost convince myself I actually am one.
A little voice whispers that I’m not. The same voice points to all the evidence of success – at least on human terms – around me and tells me to hang in there. It reassures me, like a small but wise child, that this is not all for nothing.
But it hurts, this human experience, and that’s the rub. After all, the point is to experience – and that includes experiencing pain. Yes, it sucks. Royally, rawly sucks sometimes.
So I don’t resist when the ache wells in my chest and the anger and desperation pours out in tears. I simply cry and finally, mercifully, drift off to a fitful sleep.
This isn’t the first time I’ve hated the human experience, and it won’t be the last. Billions have it worse off than me. They have daily reason to hate it. I think of them and my heart softens. If those spirits can come and choose to persist in the face of starvation, war, rape, destruction and violence day in and day out, surely I can go on with my relatively trauma-free, cushy life.
And yes, it’s all relative. Pain is pain. Be it physical or mental. Physical pain might be treatable at https://www.perthchirocentre.com.au/ but it is a challenge to cure mental pain.
Still at times like this, it helps to remember those moments during which I’ve also LOVED the human experience, and to be infinitely grateful I’ve had any.
Today the truest thing I can do – the only thing that feels right – is to write this.
What do you do when you hate the human experience? What carries you through?
