How to be a person

“Prioritize being over doing, live poetically not just productively.”

Many of us forget how to be human, what I mean is, we sometimes forget to include ourselves in everyday activities, because we become robotic and go through everyday living without exercising are will to do something different or human like. The piece is not defining life, instead, it presents small ideas to help you understand it. Each paragraph is a small nudge on the shoulder, asking the audience to look again at the ideas and not just rush past them. The piece is not intended to become a self help manual, but to remind us how to live in a world where we can enjoy everyday life and the little things in it.

I particularly liked the section that discussed how most of us see yearning as difficult, and also how most of us try to avoid it because it aches. But with a little more thought, yearning is simply a human trait. Moving on and suppressing the emotions caused by yearning because we are taught to keep moving and remain content is a way more difficult thing to do. Desire for more is never a weakness and is an essential part of being true to ourselves. It is the evidence that we still have an urge to exist and the world is a reminder that we are intricate beings designed to experience the entirety of the emotional spectrum. 

In our day to day life, we usually rush between tasks and measure what we accomplished on that day rather than how we felt. This causes us to look past small details that you don’t ever notice unless you take a moment to look at. This leads to feelings of unfulfillment that make the world so grey and dull. Therefore, moments like walking slowly, noticing colors, crying, writing words for someone you love are crucial to overcome that. None of these are deemed as grand gestures. They’re small, almost invisible choices. But together, they form a way of living that is intentional rather than automatic..

The meaning of life is more of a practice than something to achieve. Life is not something we arrive at fully mastered, and we will be coming back to try to make sense of it through nature, writing, people, observation. These are all ways to make sense of the world. It’s about the practice of sitting with something, and staying with it, even when it is not clearly defined or when it is tempting to move on to something else or when it is not glittering. And perhaps that is the essence of humanity, the willingness to choose and re choose to devote attention to something until all the loose ends are tied up, and everything is wrapped up nicely.

— How to Be a Person — Ankita Shah (Substack)
Full article → https://open.substack.com/pub/ankitashah/p/how-to-be-a-person