Choosing to be Human.

Getting back to Robert Greenleaf's series of articles on living life with a purpose that appeared in the 1966 AA Grapevine volumes, I would like to delve into his August suggestion of choosing to be human. Before we make a choice to be human, we need to have some understanding of what it means to be human.

In his cosmic creation story, The Universe Is A Green Dragon, Brian Swimme writes,

“the difference between humans and other primates [is] in the ability of the human to make play its dominant activity throughout a lifetime. Unique among species, the human makes exploration, surprising discoveries, experimentation, and –above-all learning the central activities of life itself.”

I like this idea that as humans our life should be more about play, more about enjoying life, and not so much about working.

Greenleaf reminds us,

“The choice that any of us can make no matter how intolerable our own lot, is to use what little freedom and resources we possess to make the lives of those around us more significant and rewarding. The choice to make life more tolerable for others, in all of our relationships, is open to all of us. Too often, by reacting to the treatment we receive, rather then choosing how we will act when the initiative is ours, we compound someone else’s error rather then creating our own good.”

So how can we make our lives more tolerable, how to we create our own good? I think we achieve this by encouraging more play, creativity, enjoyment; let go of the focus on production, output, profit and simply maximize our playtime.