We Came Here to Feel

Nobody hands you a map when you’re born. They hand you a story

A house. Three kids. A dog with a good name and a picket fence that someone paints white every spring. All part of the story we were handed at birth. A career that rewards your loyalty by asking less of you as the years accumulate. A world that grows kinder and more connected as it ages, like a marriage when two people finally learn how to listen. A story. A beautiful story about an honest longing, like a child’s drawing of home, all crayon lines and smoke curling out of a chimney, the sky exactly the right shade of sunset.

Life doesn’t look like the drawing. It never quite did. It’s two steps forward and then a resurfacing grief that comes out of nowhere on a Wednesday, sitting in traffic, years after you thought you’d finished grieving. It’s tenderness so real and breathtaking, and then the shock of what human beings are capable of doing to each other. It’s connection and estrangement and reconnection. It’s love that cracks you open and love that walks away and love that stays so long it becomes invisible, which is its own particular miracle.

I’ve been blessed to travel the world and been invited into places and situations I once dreamed about… been shown doors I couldn’t have imagined would open for me, and been locked out of a few. I’ve done work that matters, work full of purpose even when it’s hard, even when it’s lonely, even when nobody’s watching. And at every single turn, in the same breath as the wonder, there’s been loss or sacrifice. Disappointment. Sorrow with a depth I couldn’t have anticipated in advance. Not despite the beauty. Alongside it.

That’s the part no one tells you about a full life. It’s full. All at once.

I used to believe we came here to accomplish something. Some great thing. Some work of meaning that would justify the whole strange passage. I spent years oriented toward purpose like a compass toward north. And there is purpose. I still believe that with all my heart. But something has shifted in me, slowly, and then all at once, the way shifts happen. I’m beginning to understand that we didn’t come here primarily to do. We came here to feel. To experience. To be “embodied.”

What a great word it is. Embodied. And also a dangerous one. To have a body and live in it. To move through the whole impossible range of what it means to be alive in a human body, in a human heart, in my case, in a woman’s body, in this wild and peculiar moment in history.

Being embodied is not about money, except for how money makes you feel when you use it well. Or when you can’t. Or when you watch someone else use it carelessly. Or when you need it for something important and don’t have it. The feeling is the teaching.

Embodiment is not about what you do for others, except that doing for others opens something in you that almost nothing else can reach. It touches your sense of worth, your guilt, your grace, the soft and complicated places where you decide whether you deserve to be here.

And, as I consider it, perhaps embodiment isn’t even about love, except that love is the most soul-exploding emotion available to a human being in a human body. When it’s real, it makes everything else make sense. Even the hard parts. Maybe especially those.

It takes time and other people to figure out what this life is for. In my search, I’ve gathered with wise women, with elders from traditions older than the countries they now live in. They’ve shared grief so ancient it has no words left, only posture. I’ve cared for people who’ve lost what they spent their whole lives building, and witnessed others find things they spent their whole lives not knowing they were looking for. A little more than a year ago, I laughed until I couldn’t breathe in a country far from home, with people I’d known for just a few days who felt like family, and cried deep tears at the airport terminal when it was time to leave. I held my dad’s hand and said goodbye for the last time, and I stood in the moment of anxious silence that preceded the cry of my grandchild’s first breath. All of this in pursuit of understanding what it means to live an embodied life.

And I have marveled, over and over and over again, at this “being human” experience.

We humans are simply remarkable. We’re flawed in ways so specific and so poignant they threaten to leave us hopeless. We’re funny. We’re cruel sometimes, and we’re kind in ways that restore one’s faith in the whole embodied experience. We carry our dead with us. We love the wrong people and the right ones. We wake up on ordinary mornings and feel extraordinary things, and we wake up on extraordinary mornings and feel nothing at all.

The story we’re given in our early life comes nowhere close to the embodied experience life actually delivers.

I don’t think we were given this life as a test, a lesson, or a trial to endure. I think we asked for it. I think some part of us, in whatever form we existed before this, looked at the whole messy, gorgeous, sorrow-drenched, beauty-soaked proposition and said yes. I want that. I want to know what that feels like.

And here we are. Feeling it. All of it.

The house doesn’t always have a picket fence. Sometimes there’s no house at all, and you build something better than a house out of the people who show up for your life. The career doesn’t always reward time invested. The world doesn’t always choose connection. And yet mornings come anyway, light shining through a window you didn’t expect to be standing at, coffee warm in your hands, something sure settling in your chest, and you know, without being able to explain it, that you are exactly where you were always going to be.

Not where the story told you to be. Not where the drawing promised. Where you were always going to be.

You came here for this. All of it.

And maybe the story is necessary for contrast. For discovery. For adventure.