Briefly Perfectly Human Quotes

Bruce Lee was proof: not all Asian Men were doomed to a life of being Generic. If there was even one guy who had made it, it was at least theoretically possible for the rest. But easy cases make bad law, and Bruce Lee proved too much. He was a living, breathing video game boss-level, a human cheat code, an idealized avatar of Asian-ness and awesomeness permanently set on Expert difficulty. Not a man so much as a personification, not a mortal so much as a deity on loan to you and your kind for a fixed period of time. A flame that burned for all yellow to understand, however briefly, what perfection was like.

we are witnessed, even at the end of our lives. You are seen. You are heard. Your life matters. Your death will too.

Falling in love can create a paralyzing fear of death. We become so much more aware of our mortality and that of our beloved when we are in love. We fear losing them, and life holds more value and purpose. It can be terrifying. But what else matters except opening ourselves to love? It's one of the "whys" of life. It shapes our fullest, most vivid memories.

Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being—that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen—seems little short of miraculous. Because he maintained perfect silence about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff his later success, it was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the exceptional nature of his personal triumph. What we know of Hamilton’s childhood has been learned almost entirely during the past century.

Exactly what kind of scientist I didn’t completely understand until a few weeks later, when I happened to read a wonderful biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the great early nineteenth-century German scientist (and colleague of Goethe’s) who revolutionized our understanding of the natural world. Humboldt believed it is only with our feelings, our senses, and our imaginations—that is, with the faculties of human subjectivity—that we can ever penetrate nature’s secrets. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice” that is “familiar to his soul.” There is an order and beauty organizing the system of nature—a system that Humboldt, after briefly considering the name “Gaia,” chose to call “Cosmos”—but it would never have revealed itself to us if not for the human imagination, which is itself of course a product of nature, of the very system it allows us to comprehend. The modern conceit of the scientist attempting to observe nature with perfect objectivity, as if from a vantage located outside it, would have been anathema to Humboldt. “I myself am identical with nature.

The experiences we have while dying are universal, yet we feel most alone while journeying through it. I hope these stories show you that we are witnessed, even at the end of our lives. You are seen. You are heard. Your life matters. Your death will too.

Falling in love sometimes feels like tripping over yourself. It’s one of life’s big messy adventures, and one of my greatest joys. Over a lifetime of relationships, I’ve become a connoisseur of its many stages. That deep belly-tickle at discovering rapport with a promising stranger—the hint of recognition, the surge of chemicals. Ooooh, he cute-cute. Then their intoxicating smell, slowly becoming familiar; the whisper of a private nickname as lips brush the ear. The gradual softening into a relationship, as falling in love expands into love, the enduring kind. The body, heart, and psyche are forever changed, and that love stays on in us till we die.

Sometimes best things seem like worst things until we let life unfold to reveal what is actually best.

My hair is dreadlocked and hangs down to the middle of my back. Several of the locs are jazzed up with gold strings, charms, and cowrie shells. I decorate my body heavily, choosing brightly colored clothes, adorning my ears and nose with many piercings, and draping my fingers and wrists with what some would consider an excess of brass and copper jewelry. I scent myself with frankincense and myrrh. People stare at me wherever I go. Significantly more in Janna, Sri Lanka, than in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. But no matter--I'm gonna give them something worth looking at. I'm only here for a small amount of time. So I insist on taking up space in the world, in rooms, in my life, and in my relationships. I wouldn't have it any other way. I am here. This is my body. It is the place I live and also the place where I will die.

I don't think its an accident that in my Going with Grace doula training classes, white cisgendered and heterosexual folks are sometimes in the minority. I can only remember three straight white guys in the thousands of students who are otherwise queer as folk, inhabit many intersections, and celebrate their difference. Those who sit on the fringe in life can more easily get close to the fringe in death.

It didn't matter, in the end, that married life wasn't my dream. It was Cosmopolitan magazine's. It belonged to the patriarchy and society. I was grieving the idea of a life that had never been mine, but still, I grieved. Cultural norms are like lead in our drinking water--you can be aware of their presence, but that doesn't make you any less sick.

Maybe what I needed, finally, was to wake up to that voice inside of me, and acknowledge, finally and fully, what it was trying to tell me: ONE DAY YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. It is the simplest truth of them all, and yet it is the one we fight the hardest. We push it away. We procrastinate. Death is something that happens to other people, or else to us in a future so distant it's the same thing as "never." We prioritize all the things that matter the least at the expense of those that matter most. People wait entire lifetimes to see the Great Wall of China until they are too sick to travel, and save the bottle of Veuve Clicquot till they can't drink anymore. We wait till tomorrow to make that important phone call, until Friday to wear the purple lipstick, or for the summer to start working on the clubhouse for the kids. Before we know it, we have an illness, then a diagnosis, then we are knocking at death's door. Life is now. It's right here. This is it. The past is just a series of memories coded in the hippocampus. Tomorrow, forever a day away, is a myth and an illusion of our brain's insistence on linear time. This moment is the only one that exists. In the very next moment, you could also be gone, a memory in someone else's hippocampus.

But the idea of death is a seed. What that seed is carefully tended, life grows like wildflowers in its place. The only thing in our control is how we choose to engage with our mortality once we become aware of it. Cuba is when I became aware. If you are not yet aware, what in the world are you waiting for?

I am exasperated that people believe death is the great equalizer. Yes, we all die, but we die of different causes at different rates in different ways There is nothing equal about death, except that we all do it. Death and dying are culturally constructed processes that reflect social power dynamics--they are unequal. How we die is wrapped up largely in the intersections of our identities.

Some mornings, I would eye my favorite yellow chiffon tutu skirt but would talk myself out of wearing it to work. It wasn't "professional" enough. I'd take off my multicolored nail polish to present at board meetings and pull my locs back in a low ponytail for court. Each time I changed outfits because of fear that I didn't look the part, I traded a small piece of my authenticity to conform to a life I'd convinced myself I was supposed to want. I was trying to dress a zebra up as a horse.

We can spend our lives fretting about our deaths, or we can use our brief time to sink deeper into the experience of being human, for all it entails. The good, the tricky, the impermanent. We can acknowledge our death will one day come and use that knowledge to create a life so whole, so honest, so juicy, that it is worth leaving. I have seen over and over human beings' personal reckonings in the final moments of life. It begs the question: What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I may live presently and die gracefully? Without our deaths, none of it would matter. There would be no context for what we do. When we live in relationship to our mortality, it adds direction to our actions, truth to our words, rapture to our experience, authenticity to our being, and maybe pounds to our hips. We can make choices that resonate with the core of our being, free from societal expectations and the judgment of others. While our lives and choices may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, they are not. With the dizzying serendipity that must occur for us to be born, the fact that we live is a miracle.