How Funny, Us Humans
A lyrical love letter to us, and our beautiful contradictions
How funny, us humans. Making sounds like Aaa, Aey, Ooo, singing to touch each other without touching. Our little mouths. Teeth lined up behind the soft folds of flesh, our miraculous lips. A tongue that flaps, rarely resting on its bed, sticking to the roof. Our jaws clenched all day. How funny, us humans. We get scared of an email. We feel hopeless about the leaders of our imagined nations. We miss our childhood shops and toys that don’t exist any more.
How funny then, that we sing to let our mouths free once in a while. We move our mouths, to kiss our pets, suck a fruit, sing A.R. Rahman songs before dinner to remember that savouring is a thing worth every second of it.
How funny, us humans. Plonked on this lonely planet so that we can suffer, alone and together. Savour, alone and together.
Funny how we found a fruit called cotton and drew it into threads and wove it into cloth. Funny how we wrap ourselves in it. How we blow air through holes in a hollow stick, pluck endless strings, slap and thrash drums. Funnier even, how we move our own bodies, shimmying sideways and rocking our hips.
How funny to have all this apparatus, and on most days, do nothing with it.
To be at a desk staring at a flickering screen, instead of against a tree staring at the fascinating sky.
To have exchanged our wilderness for intelligence only to one day worry about artificial intelligence. And then praise our leftover wilderness.
All animals knew about the heat generated by striking two bodies against each other. Imagine the humans who tried striking two stones against each other and discovering fire. Were they scared or amazed? What would they think of the little lighter in our pocket?
With fire, we cook and show each other how to cook. We taste and tell each other how it tastes. Fire gathers those hungry for food and connection. Funny how we forget this basic need and discover it again and again.
We take this earth, add some water, and shape it into pots. No other animal can mould and contain and carry and hold the way we do. We take this earth and shape it into Gods to bow down to. We take this earth and build a home upon it. Until the earth takes us and we become the earth. Our destiny is to become this life-giving planet.
So we all get to be a mother, eventually? How lovely.
One weird thing about being bipedal is that our chests have become weirdly exposed. But the cool thing is that when one vulnerable chest meets another, we call it a hug. We hold one spine in parallel with another, place arm upon arm and call it a cuddle. When the places from where we eat and speak and smile meet — solid, liquid, and gas state become one, and we call it a kiss.
We collected some wood from trees and some flesh from animals to create musical instruments. That music moves our bodies even when we don’t decide to, or even notice. And those of us who never dance still love to move our hands while talking.
Bodies that take in so much information, must release this or that all the time.
How funny that across cultures, we came up with mythical creatures called dragons and then named a fruit, dragonfruit. Bottlebrush is a flower named after a plastic brush developed to clean the insides of bottles. We stream videos and upload them on the cloud and surf the web, staying completely dry. We shoot each other when we are in beautiful settings.
What would have happened had I not seen a life before the great takeover of the screens? My memories are more precious to me than all the hard disks of the world.
It is one thing to miss my parents who have shifted to a village near my hometown to start a school and then to see that place on google earth, two yellow school buses parked in a farm. It is one thing to wonder where such and such schoolmate is, and then have no interest in them when you actually follow them on Instagram.
By tenth grade I learned how to draw perfect diagrams of all our systems, but especially the digestive system. That experience did not help me solve any of my digestive issues. Nobody told us that these organs are inside you, you can feel them. Can you feel them? It is not just “the liver” it is your liver. You have a pancreas and so does the girl who doesn’t want to invite you to her party.
I want to laugh and dance more than a skeleton. I’ve never seen a sad skeleton all crouched up. Even the one in the Biology lab in school, who was given a small closet to hang in, seemed relaxed. He had a “no-exams-coming-up” look that made me envious.
Cooperation, compassion, learning from the past and planning our future - these are some of the traits that helped us evolve as a species. So when Mary Oliver reminded us of being soft animals, she wanted us to take a break from all this work, every once in a while.
Recently I read that elephants also use names. We not only name ourselves, we name our cities and countries, our relationships and emotions, our schools and creative projects, all our recipes. The bird doesn’t title her song, the peacock’s dance remains untitled. But I took six months to title this Substack.
How funny, that we gather in auditoriums, and pay our hard-earned cash to a funny person, to make us laugh.
What amazes you about our species? Please tell me.
This essay started in an unforgettable Ochre Sky Memoir Writing Workshop session. 💜
Discover the transformative power of personal writing with Natasha Badhwar
and Raju Tai at Ochre Sky Stories Memoir Workshop.
What amazes me is that every time we see a baby, a cat or a dog, we instinctively talk in lower, sweet tone. We do not have to remind ourselves, it just comes naturally to us. As if our normal tone wouldn't be deciphered
I am amazed how we are all drawn to water. The lake, sea, river, a warm bath, hot tun, cold plunge. We crave our origin space, I suppose--amniotic fluid or primordial ooze. We wade, dive, float. Submerge.