Rodrigo Neely - November 9th, 2008 in Feature 0 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

I woke up today in a horrible mood.

It happens to the best of us.

I had been planning on writing this piece for Edger about crashing on my motorscooter and use the crash to reflect on humanism.

I woke up and did my morning info-junkie rituals and found the new Will.i.am video. Its called “Its a New Day.”

It\’s A New Day

This kind of music is not usually my style, but this song, this video echoed much of the emotion that I want to portray in this post.

***

A little over a week ago I was going on an errand on my motor scooter, which at 150 cc’s it maxes out at about 60 mph. I like to take it about 40 mph, and I made a sharp turn at about this speed, and hit a pothole, and lost control. I was not wearing my helmet.

***

When I first stopped believing in God I became depressed.

I had been deeply religious and had taken no small comfort in the notion of the afterlife. I had realized that an afterlife was all but impossible years earlier from learning about neuroscience and psychology’s unbreakable dependence on the organ of the brain. But when I stopped believing I could no longer hope for an afterlife.

***

The scooter was straight up as I went off the road. Since I wasn’t tilting yet I felt I could still gain control. I saw a pile of rocks from construction not far ahead of me, and I thought to myself “If I can just break it will be fine.”

***

Over a few months I began to finally embrace the fact that I was going to die. To cease to exist. It weighed heavily on my values.

As time has progressed I have learned more and more about how this one life, this absent heavenly father to hedge bets in my favor, leave me with some real things to believe in, to care about, to love.

The human beings we have in our lives are all we will ever have.

The people we know, and love, no matter how briefly, are in a very real sense the only paradise and heaven we will ever know.

I came to believe that the only worthwhile purpose of life is to see humanity grow, to see it become better, starting with oneself and those we all know and love. Life is a project of learning, love, and passion as we all embrace our precious little time on this earth.

***

I lost control.

I went down on my left side hard. The scooter stayed on top of me. I had lots of thoughts that I remember. My first being “This is going to hurt a lot more than when I’ve done this on a bicycle.”

Followed by realizing that I was not wearing a helmet and that I was sliding on the ground hard, and fast, with no notion of when I would stop. I realized I could die. I realized that I might hit the construction piles and damage my brain, losing all that I am.

***

In the last few days I have seen humanity in rare form.

Though I know many of my readers are not democrats, or Obama fans, most of my friends, readers and loved ones are. And no matter how you feel about Obama, we have all seen the first African American president elected.

We have seen the enlightenment which set the ground for humanistic ethics bloom in a major way. We have seen many of the wounds of history begin to heal.

When my scooter stopped sliding I could not feel my leg. I was underneath my scooter.

Two cars pulled up to see if I was alright. For all of my struggles with my neighbors, I have never found myself abandoned in public distress. When I went down I did not go down in a busy intersection, but people stopped. Strangers stopped. Humans stopped.

They asked me how I was.

I reasoned so long as I could stand everything was fine.

My arm had traded in skin for mincemeat with grass growing from the wounds. Apparently if you move fast enough, grass will stab into you.

My leg was still not responding, I had to use my arms to pull myself from underneath the scooter. Then slowly I stood, with great pain.

***

Slowly we can all stand, in spite of great pain.

There is a real source of righteousness to be found in believing that human beings are the most important thing we know. You do not have to have your sense of ethics clouded by unproven commandments from what mankind dreams is above.

You can see that people in all of our messiness can truly be great. Humans can truly experience happiness, and spread that happiness through freedom, love, compassion, and understanding. Humanity is the best hope for humanity.

We awake each day, and many of us experience apathy and confusion. We experience emotional uncertainty and rejection by people we care for. We suffer from the crashing waves of life in a sea of causality where it often feels as though we can have very little impact. But this is only part of the picture.

This uncertainty is a pain much worse than what I felt in my leg that day. I put my foot down and it shot all through my body. As we must all bravely realize that we know something worth standing for. We know that mankind can be better, can be great. It is the greatness of one another which composes the rest of the picture.

For may of us we have seen the greatness this November 4th. If you watch the video from Will.i.am and hear him link the journey from Hariett Tubman, to Lincoln, to King, to Obama. You see the tears of Jesse Jackson, though he spat poison at Obama so recently. In spite of their conflicts, you can see Jesse Jackson who has soldiered through so much see some reward in this mighty moment.

Humanity has greatness, and humanism is the unrelenting love of that greatness.

With my other leg I was able to move. In spite of the great pain, and I dismissed my heroic neighbors come to tend the wounds of a stranger.

In spite of the pain of standing, we all have two legs. In the analogy of my stand from my crash let my good leg be all those people in your life who love you.

How harsh life can be. How painful and unfair. How confusing and messy.

But much of what makes it great is how we overcome those hardships. We all have a good leg. We all have those who love us, who treasure us, who think of us and who want nothing more than to see us each spread our wings.

The greatest treasure in life is our loved ones, our friends, our family. The second greatest treasure in life is to spread that love as far is it will go.

For me loyalty is a precious virtue, but I am never loyal for its own sake, I am loyal to that inner fire which I know burns in all my friends which burns like an engine to make humanity better for us all.

I see little saviors of the world all around me, in each of the people I care for, I see their unique perspectives and how many of those perspectives should be canon and transform the world.

I live for this.

I yearn to be a good leg for those I love, and they have been good legs for me. Helping me take steps when in a world of pain, walking slowly forward, gaining ground each footprint a slight change on the face of the earth.

This week I saw the face of the earth changed forever, and I found comfort from my wounds.

Life is the chance to make life better.

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