✦ Prefer to listen?
Let Human Glimmer read this one to you.

Sometimes something gets stuck in your head and you can’t quite let it go. Maybe you’re trying to make sense of what happened or figure out why it bothers you as much as it does. You know there’s something there. You just haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.

Other times, the question itself may be clear. Maybe you’re questioning something you’ve believed for years. Maybe your life doesn’t look the way you thought it would, and you’re trying to decide whether that means something needs to change or whether the expectation itself is the problem.

You may not find an answer. But every once in a while, you come across something that gives you a little bit more than you had before. A thought makes something click. A question makes you realize you’ve been looking at something from only one direction. Someone says something that doesn’t solve the problem, but it gives you another way to think about it. A glimmer.

We usually hear that word attached to hope. A glimmer of hope isn’t having certainty that everything is going to work out the way you want. It isn’t even a lot of hope. It’s just enough to leave room for a different possibility.

But hope isn’t the only thing that can come in a glimmer.

You can have a glimmer of understanding before you completely understand something. A glimmer of possibility before you know whether something will work. You can recognize a piece of yourself in something someone says before you have any idea what you’re supposed to do with that recognition.

That’s what I mean by Human Glimmer.

There’s a lot we don’t understand. We spend our lives trying to make sense of ourselves, other people, and the world around us, all from our own little corner of it.

We wonder why we do some of the things we do. We try to understand why people affect us the way they do. And sometimes we find ourselves questioning things about life that don’t seem to have one clear answer.

I don’t think we’re going to figure all of that out, but we can look at one piece at a time. We can take one small part of being human and examine it more closely. That’s one part of a Human Glimmer: a glimmer of something human. Not a complete explanation, just a chance to understand something a little better and see what else might become clearer because of it.

There’s another part of Human Glimmer, too: the human it’s coming from. I can tell you what I think, question an assumption, or offer another way of looking at something. Sometimes I’ll probably be pretty confident about what I think. Other times I might end up with more questions than I started with.

But I’m not standing somewhere outside the human experience explaining it to everyone else. I’m in it too. I’ve changed my mind, made decisions I regretted, and wondered what the hell I was doing.

I think that matters because it’s one thing to talk about being human and another thing to actually live through all the contradictions that come with it. We can know that something is irrational and still feel it. We can understand what we should probably do and still struggle to do it. We can believe something deeply and still have days when we question whether we believe it at all.

So Human Glimmer is, in a lot of ways, one human talking to another about the strange experiences that come with being one. Sometimes I may offer a perspective you haven’t considered. Other times, I may ask a question that leads you somewhere completely different. Not everything here will resonate with you, and it doesn’t have to. Take what gives you something to think about and leave the rest.

And that brings me to the last part of a Human Glimmer: the glimmer you find in it. That glimmer won’t always be the same. Maybe something gives you a little hope when you’ve been having trouble finding any. Maybe it gives you some clarity about something you’ve been going back and forth on. Or maybe you recognize yourself in something and finally have words for an experience you haven’t known how to explain.

Sometimes the glimmer might not feel particularly comforting. You might notice something about yourself that’s uncomfortable to recognize. You might see a situation differently once you’ve looked at it from another angle. Or you might realize something you weren’t quite ready to admit to yourself.

I still think those things can be glimmers.

Understanding doesn’t always feel good when it first shows up. Sometimes seeing something more clearly can make things more complicated. Because now you know something you didn’t know before, and that’s when you have to decide what to do with it.

A glimmer isn’t an answer just because it showed you something. It’s something becoming visible, and what you do with what you see is still yours to figure out.

That’s what Human Glimmer is trying to do. Not every lousy experience needs to become a lesson or be reframed until we can call it a blessing. Sometimes things are hard because they’re hard. But accepting something for what it is doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to understand about it. Maybe there’s another perspective to consider, a question worth asking, or simply something you can see a little more clearly than you did before.

✦ Closing Glimmer

You don’t always need to have an answer. Sometimes a little more understanding is enough.

Glimmerings ✦

Thoughts from Human Glimmer that don’t always need a whole article.

Some ideas need room to be explored. Others just need somewhere to land. Glimmerings is an email newsletter about things I’ve been thinking about, questions worth sitting with, and new things from Human Glimmer.