a very human experience

With history we have a tendency to forget that people are just like us, that alexander the great was a human just like the rest of us, it is funny most of us aren't kings or queens, we will not be remembered as they are yet we find a need to preserve ourselves in carvings in trees, or burying little time capsules, every single person has a deep primal need to persist, we leave handprints on walls, mark our growth as children on a wall or write in the margins of books. Reaching out into the future for some unknown human long after we are gone just to say, hello I was here. We are not so far removed from the humanity that lived before us. A child 10000 years ago left fingerpaintings on a wall, and a Viking climbed up a rock just to carve the words ‘this is very high’ 10ft off the ground. Centuries ago, somebody burned their dinner so thoroughly that they buried the pot in the back garden rather than attempt to clean it. Shakespeare got drunk and wrote sex jokes, tutankhamun was a little boy who loved ducks more than anything. A roman carves his name into a monument in another country saying ‘i was here’ a prisoner years ago in the tower of London scratches lines into the wall as a tally marking the days. A medieval monk scrawls in the margins bemoaning the boredom of his work. Every human in history has said ‘i was here, I lived, I loved, I made something, I laughed, I cried, please do not forget me’. We are all unified in our humanity, Tudor peasants had painful hangnails, nobels of the Qin dynasty had favourite foods, workers in the 1700s liked seeing flowers growing in pavement cracks, a cook in Iran cried cutting up onions, a mother in 1300 told her child not to get grass stains in his clothes. We are unified in our common human experience for it has not changed all that much, we still carry the same names that have been used for millennia, I wonder how many times the earth has heard a mother calling alexander, how many times the stars have caught a lover whispering Freyja, how many times the ground we’ve walked on and continue to walk on felt vibrations of a friend excitedly yelling ‘mary’. In our humanity we are bound in our tragedy and suffering, I think of the woman in Pompeii trying to shield a child with her body, there is a man close with arms stretched wide like he was seconds away from shielding the woman and the child. It may have been a grandmother and a neighbour trying to protect their grandson, a mother and father trying to protect their child or maybe they were strangers. While we do not know the circumstances, we know that two people cared so much about somebody so much that even when the world was on fire and the gods had abandoned them, they were still willing to die trying to save someone else. In our human love, we find comfort in all those who have lived before us, it is because of that we know what love looks like. Love looks like all the people across history who have cared for their pets and named them sweet things like much beloved or grain of gold, and even commissioned for their likeness to be carved or painted or made into mosaics because their affection was so much greater and grander than the constraints of a human lifetime. I think of the scriptures all over the world painstakingly crafted hundreds of years ago with paw prints and spelling mistakes or drawings covering up those mistakes, I think of my own school books that have doodles in the margins and corners, the scribbled out spelling mistakes, the mindmaps with messy lines or my rushed notes in a literature book, in those moments I am a human, no different from those who came before. Human nature is beyond duality, it seeks growth in the unknown potential of the human experience. In front of life's omissions lies a growing summer. I will continue to live and struggle until the very end because that's what humans do, it is but our nature. I am in the comfort of one big human story that will be remembered by all those who come after and like all other humans who came before I mark the world with “Look, I was here, don't forget me”