To Be Human Is To Be Messy
Let's embrace that truth together
Dear Ones,
To be human is to be messy, indeed. And this week was a bit messier than usual for me. That is why I didn’t send this on Friday afternoon, as I usually do.
Did you even notice?
I digress.
I wanted to thank y’all for your engagement with these posts so far. I’m now closing out my fifth month since going public with this publication, and I’m pretty gratified by and grateful for your response so far.
Do you wanna know what the Open Rate for these missives has been? We’ve maintained a consistent average of 73%. (!!)
That is virtually unheard of, for mass emails.
Now, granted, these emails I send out cannot be qualified as “mass” yet (maybe someday)… but they are still sent out en masse, and to have that kind of engagement from y’all is just… wow.
Thank you, thank you. 🙏🏻
So.
Now.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to up your level of engagement from reading-only… to reading-and-commenting.
And guess what? If you don’t have a comment in you, there’s another option to increase your engagement. Just “heart” the posts, to let me know you’re here and reading along and taking in what I’m saying.
From the beginning, my hope has been for this to be a community, a place for meaningful conversations between us all. And I’d LOVE to see that start to happen.
With Love,
Cecelia 💗
PS:
As a reminder, I’m now offering group subscriptions to For the Love of Humanity — which allows teams to sign up for the full value here… with a discount.
People have told me that they really want to bring their teams into the discussion here, and I hope this helps that happen.
entropy (noun) | en·tro·py | ˈen-trə-pē
1 | thermodynamics: a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system's disorder… broadly: the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system.
2 | a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder.
3 | chaos, disorganization, randomness
I think we can all agree that being human is messy.
Yes?
Think about how we all first started our lives, as babies. The adults around us were pretty much on 24/7 mess-cleaning-up duty. The amount of mess we could make then, even as tiny beings just a few inches long, was somewhat astounding.
As we grew, we got much better at cleaning up our own messes — and then, at learning to hide them, so as to pretend we don’t make them at all, except in front of a select few humans that we have decided can witness them.
But there is never a point at which we don’t make messes.
Not really.
These bodies of ours are full of processes and fluids that are messy. Our minds can be messy. Our emotions are most certainly messy. The trauma that we have all experienced throughout our lives spills out messily all around us, all the time.
Even when we get up from our beds in the morning, the covers are likely twisted and crumpled, not neatly in place, just from us lying in one place over a period of hours.
Our being in a place just… creates messes.
This is not even a particularly human thing, so much as it is just our participation in a Universe whose natural laws include a baked-in degree of entropy.
Degrees of chaos, disorganization, randomness, degradation over time are just… how this Earth functions. Don’t pay any attention to a building… a forest… a garden bed for enough time, and then do again… and you can see the entropy in process.
Weeds growing. Walls cracking. Invasive or aggressive species taking over. Flooding. Drought. Too much. Too little. All around us.
This happens within us, too.
We’re Not Supposed to Be Messy at Work
Of course, we’re not supposed to allow this messiness at work, though… right?
We gotta lock all that down at work… yes?
Our current dominant work norms were — think about it — first developed as our society was adjusting to the industrial revolution and building whole new structures and ways of work.
And we all know what a typical workplace looked like until relatively recently, in the span of history… right?
Male-dominated.
And the norms for all of those who held power, and thus were setting the norms for everybody else at work?
They were a male “breadwinner”… who didn’t have to even think about, let alone experience, the process of menstruation for a fourth-or-more of each month… or give over his whole body to grow a new human, for years worth of his lifetime… or manage the 24/7 labor of breast-feeding a new baby… or think about much else besides work, while a woman at home took care of everything else he needed to survive, to be able to show up at work every day and just focus on work, for the whole day (things like shopping for and/or growing food; making meals; cleaning and caring for clothing; shopping for or making or otherwise acquiring clothing; shopping for, or making, everything else needed to run a home; cleaning and caring for the home; caring for and raising children, and all that that entails)… and more….
Work (monetarily paid, male-coded work, that is) got to be unencumbered by all the messiness of being human, for these men.
What a privilege… eh?
And that, of course, was the expectation — the norms — they then set for everybody else in the workplace, no matter their circumstances.
Work had to happen at set, rigid times.
Personal lives were not supposed to be present.
The earlier you showed up — and the later you left — the better. That is how you would be most likely to “get ahead,” of course.
Work was designated for five days a week, while the two days designated as the “weekend” got to be almost pure relaxation.
Over the decades, the way families handle (monetarily paid) work has drastically changed.
But many of those (now quite antiquated) work norms have not.
And this is…
… ridiculous, if you ask me.
We Are Human — So We Cannot NOT Be Messy
Given all of the above, I hope we can agree that messiness is inevitable, when a group of humans is gathering together somewhere like a planet, or a nation, or a state, or a city, or a workplace.
Especially now, in this moment in world history, when it is the rare family that has one whole adult human staying home to tend to allllll the stuff that all the other humans in the home need in order to stay alive, and well — and so that those who are doing paid work can mostly just focus on work — it will be inevitable that the messiness of being human will spill into the workplace.
We all need to normalize that truth…
… and we need to actively, continuously, verbally remind each other of it often.
AND…
… and this is the hard one…
… we need to give up trying to be so “perfect” and non-human at work.
Sure, we don’t want to let ALL the mess spill out, because that could get pretty unproductive pretty quickly.
But come on, folks.
We need to welcome mess at work.
Because we are all human…
… and to be human is to be messy.
We are not robots, despite how much we might want to be… or our bosses might want us to be… or we might feel we have to be, especially now, as artificial intelligence (AI) starts storming the scene and challenging us for jobs.
Listen up.
We are human.
We are loving, we are laughing, we are joyful, we are sad, we are bored, we are angry, we are insensitive, we are self-conscious, we are prideful, we are humble, we are caring, we are collaborative, we need each other.
We are human.
And that is a heckuva lot better than any machine or robot.
So let’s start acting like it.
Let’s Stop Requiring a Lack of Messiness
Having to pretend there is not a mess when there is one is oppressive.
We are suppressing, or hiding what is… to pretend that something else entirely is reality… when it isn’t reality at all.
Oooof.
What a load to carry. What heaviness. What extra work.
And here’s the thing.
Transforming various forms of oppression, which most of us claim we want to do — really, making changes to any part of our shared lives — will almost always require messiness.
We cannot keep mess locked-down, if we want to change things.
So we really do need to start welcoming messiness.
Stuff like this:
We need to start welcoming, and openly embracing, conflict. Conflict does not need to be scary. Conflict does not even need to be that disagreeable, in fact. Unknown to many of us, because we just have not experienced it yet, conflict can be generative, if it can be shepherded in generative ways.
Similarly, we need to put down the tools of passive-aggression… manipulation… indirect communication… and their ilk… and embrace direct communication. These indirect tools were developed by people who wanted to say something, or create a result, without having to actively, openly work towards it. This desire to not be open and direct has likely had many sources, over time. But I think we need to stop avoiding what needs to be said. And just say it. Directly.
An example of the above is being willing to tell people in power, especially people like donors to nonprofits, when they have said or done something unacceptable. Speaking truth to power should be normalized. No more kow-towing, to keep up appearances… or to keep dollars flowing. No. We will overcome the desire to suppress… and actually openly confront and address problems instead.
We need to relax the rigidity many of us have. Around rules… and norms… and what we expect of our colleagues. Sure, some element of shared norms is necessary. But we need to be sure that our norms are mutually agreed upon… and that we are willing to flex them when needed.
We need to be willing to try something new, even if we have no idea how to do it, or how it will turn out. Embracing messiness in this way will give us more freedom, to try new ways of being that are unknown to any of us now. We’ll have the potential to approach whole new horizons together, if we let go of being unwilling to move into unknown spaces without a pre-determined roadmap.
Especially in this age of the dawn of AI, when we humans may be feeling even more pressure than ever before to work at the pace and perfection of a machine, let’s continuously remind ourselves, and each other, that we are not machines… and thus we do not need to be like them. Can we all just agree, too, that we prefer humans to machines? A collective agreement like that may help us forestall a whole lot of drama and trauma in the decades to come, as that kind of prioritization would likely inspire us humans to close off certain pathways currently open to AI, allowing us to avoid many potential storylines for our planet.
So.
How does this all land with you?
I really want to know.
Chime in.
Add your perspective in the comments!