Learning to Be One with Life Is a Pain in the A..

Its funny how simple life situations can lead us down the path to doing some serious contemplation. For example, I was standing in line at the post office last Tuesday, clutching a package that was exactly three ounces too heavy for the cheap shipping option, when I decided to try and love everyone.

It was a terrible idea.

The fluorescent lights were humming that specific B-flat note that drills directly into the prefrontal cortex. The guy in front of me smelled like wet wool and resentment. The clerk was moving with the speed of tectonic plate drift. And there I was, reciting this beautiful, lofty verse in my head: “May my soul bloom in love for all existence. May I find myself within all things.”

I looked at the back of Wet Wool Guy’s head. I tried to find myself in him. I tried to feel his frustration, his likely bunions, his impatience. And you know what happened? I just got annoyed. I didn’t feel a cosmic opening of the heart. I felt a spike in my blood pressure.

This is the problem with high-minded spiritual directives. They sound fantastic on a yoga mat or printed over a picture of a misty mountain on Instagram. But try applying them when you’re three days late on a deadline, your cat just threw up on the rug, and the internet is down. That’s where the rubber meets the road. And let me tell you, the road is full of potholes.

The Myth of the Gentle Bloom

“May my soul bloom.” It sounds so delicate. So inevitable. We have this Disney-fied idea of nature where blooming is a gentle unfurling, accompanied by violins.

Have you ever actually watched a flower bloom in time-lapse? It’s violent. The bud swells until it can’t take the pressure anymore and literally bursts open. It tears its own outer casing apart. It thrusts itself out into a world that is full of aphids, cold winds, and kids with baseball bats.

If my soul is going to bloom, it’s probably not going to feel like a spa day. It’s going to feel like growing pains. It’s going to involve tearing something old apart.

I remember when I finally understood what “blooming” meant for me. It wasn’t during a meditation retreat. It was at 3:00 AM on a bathroom floor in 2014, sick with the flu, realizing that I hated my job, my relationship was dead in the water, and I was entirely responsible for both. It was miserable. It was gross. I was shivering and sweating simultaneously.

But that was the crack in the casing.

We want the “bloom” without the breaking. We want to be fully human without the messy biological fluids and the embarrassing emotional breakdowns. But you can’t have one without the other. To bloom in love for existence means you have to actually look at existence. All of it. Not just the sunsets and puppies. You have to look at the rot, the decay, the betrayal, and the indifference. And you have to say, “Yeah, I guess that’s part of the deal too.”

Finding Yourself in the Things You Hate

The verse says, “May I find myself within all things.”

This is the hardest part. It’s the part I hate.

Finding myself in a majestic oak tree? Sure. Sign me up. I’m strong, I’m rooted, I provide shade. That feeds my ego. Finding myself in the ocean? Absolutely. Deep, mysterious, powerful. I’ll take that projection.

But the verse doesn’t say “find yourself in the cool stuff.” It says all things.

That means I have to look at the politician I despise and recognize the same greed, fear, and insecurity in myself. Maybe I don’t have nuclear launch codes, but have I ever exerted petty power over a waiter because I was having a bad day? Yeah. I have.

I have to look at the person who cut me off in traffic—the one I immediately labeled an “idiot”—and find the part of me that is reckless, distracted, and self-absorbed.

There is a terrifying intimacy in this. It strips you naked. It ruins your ability to be self-righteous. And I love being self-righteous. It’s one of my favorite hobbies. It feels good to stand on the pedestal of “I Would Never Do That” and look down on the masses.

But to feel with all living beings means climbing down from the pedestal and standing in the mud with everyone else. It means realizing that the capacity for terrible things lives right next to the capacity for beautiful things in my own chest.

I was reading Dostoevsky a few years back—The Brothers Karamazov—and there’s this bit about how we are all responsible for everyone else’s sins. At the time, I threw the book across the room. I thought, “I didn’t rob the liquor store! Why is that my fault?”

But as I get older (and arguably softer), I see the thread. The indifference I show to my neighbor contributes to the coldness of the world. The patience I lose with my kids adds to the ambient stress of the household. We aren’t isolated little pods of consciousness. We bleed into each other.

The “Fully Human” Trap

We talk a lot about “becoming fully human” as if it’s an ascent. We think it means becoming like an angel or a being of pure light.

I think we have the directional vector wrong.

Becoming fully human isn’t about rising above our nature; it’s about descending into it. It’s about occupying the animal body we live in with total awareness.

I spent my twenties trying to be a brain in a jar. I intellectualized everything. If I felt sad, I analyzed the sadness. If I felt love, I deconstructed the evolutionary biology behind pair-bonding. I thought that if I could just think hard enough, I could solve the problem of being alive.

It didn’t work. I was just a miserable brain piloting a meat suit I ignored.

To be fully human is to acknowledge the hunger. The lust. The fatigue. The way a hot shower feels after a long run in the rain. The way grief hits you in the gut, not the head.

One specific Tuesday, I was eating a peach. (Stick with me here). I was usually a “eat while scrolling Twitter” kind of person. But the internet was out—same outage as the cat vomit incident—so I just ate the peach.

It was shocking. The juice ran down my wrist. The texture was fibrous and strange. It was sweet and tart at the same time. For three minutes, I wasn’t an editor, I wasn’t a taxpayer, I wasn’t a guy worried about his cholesterol. I was just a mammal eating fruit.

That moment felt more “spiritual” than any church service I’ve ever sat through. I was actually there. I was fully inhabiting my humanity, senses firing, completely present for the sticky, sweet reality of the moment.

Empathy is a Muscle, and Mine is Atrophied

The verse ends with “feel with all living beings.”

This is dangerous. If you actually felt what all living beings are feeling right now, you’d dissolve. You’d burn out in a second. The suffering of the world is too loud.

So, how do we do this without going insane?

I think we have to start small. We have to stop trying to empathize with “humanity” as a concept and start empathizing with the specific, annoying humans in front of us.

It’s easy to love “the poor.” It is very hard to love the homeless guy on your corner who screams at pigeons and smells like urine. It’s easy to love “children.” It is very hard to love your own child when they are screaming in a Target aisle because you won’t buy them a $40 piece of plastic junk.

I failed at the post office. I couldn’t bridge the gap between me and Wet Wool Guy. I stayed in my little fortress of irritation.

But later that day, I tried again.

I was walking my dog. We passed a neighbor I usually avoid—an older woman who talks for forty minutes without taking a breath if you make eye contact. Usually, I pull out my phone and pretend to be busy.

This time, I stopped. I asked how she was.

She told me her husband had just been diagnosed with early-stage dementia. She told me she was scared he was going to forget her name. She told me she felt like she was drowning.

I didn’t have a fix. I didn’t have a wise quote. I just stood there on the sidewalk, holding a bag of dog poop, and listened. I felt a tiny fraction of her terror. It was heavy. It sucked.

But for five minutes, we weren’t strangers. We were just two scared people standing under a streetlamp.

Growing into Understanding

I used to think understanding life meant having answers. I thought I’d reach a certain age—maybe 40, maybe 50—and a switch would flip. I’d suddenly get it. I’d know why bad things happen to good people. I’d know the best tax strategy. I’d know how to fold a fitted sheet.

Now, I realized that “growing to understanding” is actually just growing comfortable with not knowing.

Life isn’t a riddle to be solved. It’s a song to be played. Sometimes it’s a requiem, sometimes it’s a polka. Most of the time it’s free-form jazz that sounds like a chaotic mess until you step back and hear the rhythm.

I don’t understand life any better than I did at 20. In fact, I understand less. At 20, I had rigid categories for everything. Good/Bad. Right/Wrong. Success/Failure.

Now, those lines are blurry. I’ve seen “good” people do terrible things out of fear. I’ve seen “bad” people perform acts of staggering generosity. I’ve seen success that felt empty and failures that were liberating.

The understanding isn’t data. It’s resonance. It’s the ability to sit with the complexity of it all and not look away.

The Prayer for the Rest of Us

So here I am. I’m not a guru. I’m a guy who gets irrational anger when the WiFi is slow. I’m a guy who forgets to call his mom enough. I’m a guy who judges people based on their shoes.

But I keep coming back to that verse.

May my soul bloom. Even if it hurts. Even if it’s messy. May I find myself within all things. Even the things I’d rather ignore. May I feel with all living beings. Even the ones who annoy me.

It’s an aspirational target I miss 99% of the time. But the growth is in the 1%.

The growth is in the moment you pause before snapping at your spouse. It’s in the second you choose to look a homeless person in the eye instead of looking through them. It’s in the breath you take before reacting to an insult.

That’s where the “fully human” thing happens. It’s in the micro-adjustments. It’s in the willingness to be wrong. It’s in the courage to be soft in a world that wants you to be hard.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully “bloom.” I might just be a bud that stays tightly wound for a long time. But I’m trying. I’m trying to feel the ground under my feet. I’m trying to taste the peach. I’m trying to see myself in the guy at the post office.

And maybe, just maybe, that effort counts for something.

Or maybe I just need to mail my packages online next time.

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– Best, Stable Grace Staff Writers & Editors