A Letter To Ourselves

This is a love letter to humanity. I know—we haven’t been at our best lately. Maybe not even for the last two thousand years or more. We’ve pushed our existence to excess, and worked relentlessly to erode the very nature that lets us stay alive. We’ve achieved much too, yet for millennia we’ve also enslaved, suppressed, and hunted those who were different from ourselves. We overcame wars, even world wars, only to find ourselves on the brink of another. Or perhaps it has already begun, as some have said.

So where lies the audacity to say we deserve love?

We are children on a journey, left to our own devices. We have been fooling around for quite some time. It has taken us ages to arrive at this point, history repeating itself again and again. And yet, despite everything, we haven’t destroyed the world. We have come close—more than once, in the brief span humans have existed. Maybe we will succeed, eventually. But we’re still here. Perhaps it is thanks to our ability to let ourselves be real, sometimes—not the selves we perform for the world, but the true self within. The inner child who came from somewhere and is destined for somewhere else, who is always, in every waking moment, trying to figure things out.

Each of us has been fighting to survive. Everyone bears a burden, and for those who have known little hardship, that very absence can become a challenge of its own. Each of us seeks fulfilment, something worth living for. An inner striving for higher purpose. We yearn for someone who wants us, who cares for us, who understands us, and a place where we can be.

We live among one another, yet we are so much lost in our own peril, our small personal struggle, our pride, our selfishness, our cover-up, the stories we tell ourselves, and our private gardens of solitude. Though we know inside that we are all deeply connected, we don’t truly see our neighbours, our coworkers, even our friends, as our family.

But they are.

This is a love letter to humanity, a reminder that we are worthy of love. We are worthy of this care, and it is our duty, our deepest purpose, to look for it—and look out for each other. We are not here for the things that hold us up and keep us distracted. We are not here to remain locked in ourselves. We are here to nurture what makes us true: our inner child, still capable to have a dream.

So yes, this is a love letter—to remind us that, even with American children ducking under school desks, soldiers killed by the same AR-15s, the slower deaths of souls in factories and offices and the despair, anxiety, destruction of everything cherished, all the endless sorrow, we still manage to find our way back to the home inside, within us that quiet strength.

We look at each other as separate, as other, when what lies within us is the same. If you only took the time, the patience, to look into another’s eyes, you would recognise the child inside them, at the heart of their soul. And in that moment, it wouldn’t matter who they are or what they’ve done. We come from the same source, all from a mother’s womb, we all breathe the same air, from the first seconds at birth, sweating and crying the same salty water, bleed the same red. Our worries are their worries—the ones we’ve all known. And they, like you, can dream. Of a place better than this, a world not yet here, but waiting to begin, if only we dare to let it be.