This summer, on the last day of our family vacation in D.C., my mom declared it a personal choice day. We were all sick of each other (which is usually how the last day of family vacations goes). So we went in our own directions for the day. Luke and Brooke tried to order Starbucks to a building that ended up being FBI headquarters, so they were unsuccessful in retrieving their strawberry refreshers. I put my Air Pods in and scootered to the Smithsonian. (Side-note, I think bird scooters are the great equalizer. No matter how cool you are, you will always like silly riding a Byrd Scooter. But that should not stop you, because they are fun as hell.) After spending a full week glued to my siblings, I was pumped to meander around all day. Vibing to the beat of my own drum. Days like this (with no final destinations or plans) serve as a good reminder of the beauty of free will – life can be as ugly or as sexy as you make it. You can dilly-dally until you stumble your way into the richness of life and all of its experiences, or you can stay inside and watch as the world passes you by! But enough of that, back to my story… My favorite exhibit at the Smithsonian was tucked in right at the end of the anthropology area in the museum, documenting the course of the human species from beginning to present. It was titled — “What Does it Mean to be Human?” Here were some of my favorite answers…

*Imagine the impossible*
*We tinker with our surroundings*
*To believe in right versus wrong*
*Write poetry and equations*
*To create and destroy on purpose*
*To weep for the loss of a loved one*
*Understand our connection to other living creatures*

All of these are plausible, but I think the real definition of being human is to be able to come up with your own answer. For some reason, though this exhibit struck a chord with me, I tucked it into a back pocket of my brain and forgot about it until recently. It wasn’t until I was reading Amy Poehler’s autobiography (which fucks!), that I found a snippet that I thought answered the question from the museum perfectly:

“Going from crying to laughing that fast and hard happens maybe five times in your life and that extreme right turn is the reason why we are alive, and I believe it extends our life by many years.”

To be human is to experience a vast ray of extreme emotions in short sequential order. The epitome of this experience is when you are crying over something and super fucking pissed and then you hear a joke that has no place in the room. And it makes you laugh so hard you can’t remember what you are crying about. To be human is to laugh so hard over something so minuscule, that you accidentally start crying. Fortunately, I find myself doing this a lot so I have now invested in a fantastic waterproof mascara.

To be human is to get caught in your tracks – looking around and realizing that despite everything, life offers up these moments of joy. To be human is to be caught off guard by moments of joy when you least expect them, reminding you that even in the chaos of life, there’s beauty to be found. To be completely and utterly loss in organic experience. It’s the messiness and absurdity of it all that makes the human experience so rich and full of depth — the ability to laugh, to cry, to feel deeply, all at the same time. And that’s all she wrote!

Here’s some other favorites from my D.C. personal day…