The Clay of the Human Spirit

Throughout my adult life, I have seen a wide spectrum of people: the wounded, the self-absorbed, the unstable, the misunderstood, and the innocent. Many of these individuals either have a strong reason for living or never question their own humanity at all. At one point, I asked myself, “What is the meaning of life?” Now, in retrospect, I believe my framing was wrong from the beginning.

The human spirit is much like clay. Clay comes in many different colors, smells, and textures. Some clay is hard to mold, while other clay is smooth like butter. Clay by itself may seem boring, but the things constructed from it can be beautiful, strange, useful, or completely unmemorable.

Now imagine if that clay could think, speak, and create. That would be one creepy-looking piece of clay. In a way, humanity is continuously being molded, either by itself or by its surrounding environment. The spirit seeks guidance wherever it can find it.

I have found myself in many situations where I had to adapt to absurd circumstances just to fit my environment because survival, instinct, and strategy depended on it. My situational awareness is tuned to the smallest changes, and I am thankful for that gift. In many ways, I am much like a chameleon.

So what is normal?

I ask this because, for many people, their normal may be completely out of reach for you, and your normal may be completely foreign to them. Some people live under extreme working conditions and simply say, “Well, this is just another day.” For a long time, I walked to work and never owned a car. Now I have a car, and that has become normal. Sometimes I catch myself getting frustrated in traffic, feeling a slight hint of road rage, when at one point road rage would have sounded like a luxury.

In the peer-reviewed study by Marie-Christin Barthel et al., “Habituation of the Biological Response to Repeated Psychosocial Stress: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, the authors discuss how people exposed to repeated stress may habituate to their circumstances. Cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, may spike the first time someone experiences a high-stress situation. However, with enough repeated exposure to the same trigger, the body may stop producing the same strong response.

Today, stress in the United States has become our new normal. With an expensive medical system and limited access to help, many people turn to screens and devices for comfort because they are the cheaper alternative. I would advise reading a book as a healthier escape. Depending on the book, reading may slow the mind and force you to block out many of the day-to-day stresses of the world.

Throughout life, the furnace of experience slowly sets us into our ways. As time goes by, many of us are molded into objects with purpose, while others become decoration. Most are overlooked, while others are celebrated for their historical significance.

When I was 20, I always wondered, “What is the meaning of life?” But reality is not always that profound. We take the shape of the world we seek, or the world we are surrounded by. That is it.

I seek a world of creativity and functional abstraction, teetering on the line between reality and spirituality.