What does it mean to be human?

Note: the following is an exercise that I had to submit at an online writing class / workshop that I am participating in. The brief was that I pick a song that I love and consider to be a great song and and turn the narrative of the song into a story, written in prose. 

Can you guess the song I picked? 

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The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a spectacular website and on that spectacular website is an interesting page, which asks an abstract question.

 

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

 

Visitors to this webpage, can submit their own responses and I don’t know how to explain it, but when I landed on that page the other day, I couldn’t help but notice an entry by a 4-year-old girl named Olivia from Palatine, IL.

 

“It means I can imagine I'm a horse with my friends.”

 

Imagination.

 

That one thing which differentiates humans from the rest of the species on this planet. Pretty much everything that we humans can relate to, is an imagination of some kind:

 

Heaven or Hell – Imaginary concept of an afterlife that really no one has been able to prove to date.

 

Countries – Actual geographies, yes. But pretty much divided by imaginary lines drawn on a piece of paper by a bureaucrat in an airconditioned office somewhere. What is Slovakia today, was Czechoslovakia when I was a baby, and was something called Bohemia a little over a century ago.

 

Religion – I mean c’mon.. really?

 

All it needs, I guess, is for a bunch of people to imagine a common imagination and start “selling” this imagination to others who are not busy imagining things. Which also begs the question, that if you had to imagine something, why would you imagine something to kill or die for? Wouldn’t you imagine a life where all the people, are living a life of peace?

 

It might sound ridiculous or idealistic at first glance, but is it really? What gives one person the right to be superior to another? What is it today that prevents the world to be as one? The more I think of it, I am certain it’s just our ability to imagine.

 

So, I say, if we have to imagine a world, let it be one where there’s no greed or hunger. A world where there’s no yours or mine, just ours. A world that shares its wisdom and its knowledge and works towards the betterment of all the species that have an equal right to be on this planet.

 

A world that imagines a better version of itself.

 

Because that’s what makes us human.

 

You may say I am a dreamer. Surely, I am not the only one!! 

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