Reclaiming What Is Human

It was 10:00 on a Sunday morning.

I was sitting alone at the kitchen table, enjoying breakfast and looking out the window at the tomato plants in the garden.

In one minute, fifteen cars passed our house.

Fifteen.

Now, we live on a county road, so traffic is not unusual. Yet it seems to have increased dramatically over the last year or two. New developments have brought more people, more vehicles, and more noise.

Perhaps what struck me most was realizing how differently people experience these changes.

I have mentioned the traffic to Dennis and to neighbors. Most seem not to notice it at all.

I do.

I feel it in my bones.

The constant movement. The constant noise. The feeling that there is always something happening, somewhere, all the time.

Maybe I am unusually sensitive to it.

Or perhaps we have simply become accustomed to things that were never meant to be normal.

Light pollution that hides the stars.

The steady loss of forests and farmland.

The endless cycle of buying, consuming, and discarding.

The expectation that we should always be available, always connected, always entertained.

We hardly question any of it anymore.

Sometimes I wonder if we are drifting further and further away from what is naturally human.

Human beings were created for connection.

For meaningful work.

For community.

For gathering around a table.

For conversations that have depth.

For time spent outdoors.

For moments of quiet.

Yet so much of modern life seems designed to pull us away from those very things.

We spend hours scrolling through carefully curated versions of other people's lives. We compare ourselves to strangers. We fill every spare moment with noise.

Even when we are together, we are often somewhere else.

I am grateful for technology and the ways it has improved our lives. Advances in medicine, communication, education, and agriculture have brought tremendous good into the world.

However, convenience is not always the same thing as flourishing.

Progress is not always the same thing as well-being.

At some point, I found myself asking a simple question: is this making life better?

For me, the answer was often no.

It has taken me more than three decades to stop chasing a version of life that never felt quite right.

I no longer feel compelled to attend every event, keep up every appearance, or participate in every race society seems to be running.

The older I get, the more I find myself drawn to simpler things.

A Bible study around a kitchen table.

A picnic after church.

A sewing club.

A conversation with someone who is genuinely interested in how you are doing.

A customer telling me how a whole chicken became Sunday supper, and how the bones became broth for the week ahead.

Those conversations fill something deep within me.

There is joy in them.

There is meaning in them.

There is humanity in them.

Perhaps that is what I have been searching for all along.

Not a perfect life.

Not a quieter road.

Not even a different place.

Just a return to the things that make us human.

Real community.

Meaningful work.

Shared meals.

Wonder.

Conversation.

Stewardship.

Connection.

I do not think we need more noise.

I think we need more of that.

~ LO