Cute little human things
We're really mad cute.
The half run when someone holds a door open for you. Bus drivers waving to each other at traffic lights. Refilling everyone's water glasses at dinner. Letting someone go in front of you in a line. Saying bless you after sneezes. Pretending to sleep to get to sleep.
Kissing each other on the forehead. Covering your eyes when you get scared. The happy dance after the first bite of food. Holding hands with your favourite people. Communicating with a friend in just one look.
Crossing your fingers for someone. Taking a headphone out to hear announcements. Running up to each other at airports. Helping strangers carry suitcases and prams up the stairs. Sending 'this made me think of you' texts. Clasping your hands together when you're excited. Asking each other 'how are you, really?'
Just life. Just cute little human things.
There is good here. There’s so much good here. So much good playing hide and seek in the closets of life, just waiting for us to rummage through and find it. We think the good stuff is hiding behind tea dresses and crumpled shirts but it’s right here. Dozing underneath the headlines. Napping in between the painful stuff, cruel stuff. The hard stuff. It’s easy to forget. With news cycles and emotive documentaries that highlight so much hurt, it feels like just viewing it causes a thousand paper cuts to the heart. It doesn’t mean that we don’t watch or read. Not all of us have the capacity to, but I will always choose to bear witness to all that exists here, because the phrase, “these are my people”, is how I feel about all people.
The South African concept of Ubuntu (from Zula and Xhosa languages), is something that I’ve often referred to as an articulation for how I’ve felt my entire life. There’s such comfort in falling into the atmosphere of a new word that manages to encapsulate a feeling or knowing that you’ve been holding, but couldn’t find a way to describe. Ubuntu is one of these words for me. Desmond Tutu wrote and described it as, “…the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and is inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong to the whole, to the community, to the tribe, to the nation, to the earth.”
These words tumbling into sentences and structure just feel like a knowing that’s been stored in my veins. When I think about interconnectedness, all I feel is truth. The truth is that we belong to each other, ourselves, this land, and all that exists here. It’s why I can visit the seabed of pain; read, see and feel all of it and swim up to the surface for air to find goodness and light. There’s indescribable amounts of good that comes from our very humanness. We are a fundamentally cute people. I don’t at all think we’ve forgotten it, because we feel it every day.
The joy that lives in the quiet moments. The hushed beauty of our everydayness that falls into the category of habitual, but holds boundless magic. But, are we allowing the good stuff which seems small, to be celebrated and turned into daily ceremony? Some people worship Gods, but what if we worshipped the ordinary instances of our humanity? The cute little things that humans do, from Monday to Sunday, January to December, midnight to midnight.
I want to make a ceremony out of it all. Out of us. Out of life. This human experience. All of it. I will always notice what sometimes goes unnoticed. I carry a placard within me that speaks of not wanting to only celebrate the big things in life. People are smart, we know this. We’ve done all kinds of creative, inventive, genius-type shit. That alone doesn’t tell the story of us. When I read history books telling the facts of us, the dates of us, I yearn to have cemented in the history of us, all of the cuteness that is so cooked into us. The little things we do. It’s what I look for when I’m reading books, the lines I allow yellow highlighters to cloak in luminescence. The moments between the big plot lines. The filler of life in between the action. I want to read about a character pulling out a chair for someone to sit on. I want to flick through pages and see people remembering your bagel order and the protagonist covering their eyes during a scary film.
The stuff that is so deserving of celebration, noticing, and committing to memory. The quiet moments in the day when we realise that we owe our smiles to the simplicity of bus drivers waving to each other as they pass each other in the street. Or, the presence of a baby in any public space, suddenly metamorphosising it into one which has a soundtrack of awws and coos that mimic birdsong.
We’re just very cute, aren’t we and I want to celebrate it, and us.
Refilling everyone's water glasses at the dinner table is a ceremony. When we pour into glasses that are not our own. Honouring the need to hydrate in bodies that we ourselves don’t inhabit. That is love. That is a small but poignant reminder of how whisked up we all are in one another. Yet, in its familiarity and obviousness it isn’t an act that is philosophised about, or remarked upon beyond a “thank you”. But, I am entirely besotted by the fact that we just do this.
Can someone write a song about how gorgeous it is that we physically cross our fingers for someone, in the hopes that things will work out as they intended? How outrageously cute is that! No, really, if you sit with it, how special is it that we are so swept up in wanting the best for someone that our body is compelled to create a shape with our fingers to try to actualise their desire into reality. Tell me you’re not blushing and gushing right now.
Don’t even get me started on holding hands. It’s a gesture (that sea otters also do, by the way) that I will never grow tired of. There’s such tenderness in holding hands. A non-verbal action that somehow seems to be encyclopaedic in nature. It’s almost as if our fingers know that by wrapping themselves around someone else’s fingers, it can say, “I’ve got you”, “I’m here”, “you’re going to be okay”, “I’m listening”, and “I love you”.
In the last month, I’ve held hands with a friend in the back of a taxi after a night out, another while walking from the train station back to her house (romance your friends, I keep saying it) and my mum on a walk through the park. I’ve held hands with my lover with such touching frequency, that our hands now search to reunite with each other, even after the briefest moment of separation. Through gardens and train stations, historic houses and his house, the streets of London and picnic blankets. There’s often a deficiency in language, that our hands seem to find a way to make words of.
Oh, the delicious paradox of being human. You can be in the frustration that your Evri delivery driver has “attempted to deliver your package” when you and them both know they haven’t. Then, swiftly feel the melting on the floor kind of swooning that comes from realising that some of our ancestors started holding hands as a sign of affection and we still do it and it’s delightful.
I want to hear poetry about helping strangers carry their suitcases and prams up the stairs at train stations. That is romance to me. An exemplification of care. Such deep care for an unknown someone who your life has momentarily collided with. Who you never knew existed but in that instance, just because they are a person on this planet, just as you are a person on this planet, you see them, you see that they can’t carry everything alone, and that they shouldn’t have to. I love that we can do that for each other. One oversized suitcase, “do you need some help?”, and toddler-filled pram at a time.
I read this tweet recently and it reminded me of why I wrote, “Sending 'this made me think of you' texts” in the poem at the top of this letter. Plus, the mention of penguins makes it even more adorable. Pigeons, penguins, pandas, pangolins…The P names are where it’s at. Alas, I digress. This post touched me, because I live for sending and receiving things like this. First of all, the fact that we have the ability to even think is remarkable. Secondly, the fact that we can remember people for long enough to think about them is a gift, one that we only realise is precious when our memory starts to fade. I love when thoughts of someone spontaneously re-emerge as we move through life. When we are engaged in the world, with all of its immense stimuli, it is really meaningful and quite amazing that the thought of someone is powerful enough to jump over the hurdles of all those details our senses pick up on and go right into your mind. Where we dwell in thoughts of them for a while. Maybe we see a meme and fire off a “this is soooo you” text or pick up a book that made us think of them. Cute. Little. Human. Things.
What a privilege it is to be thought of.
I could write pages about the softness in kissing each other’s foreheads. Moving hair from someone’s face. Letting each other know we have something in our teeth. I internally shake in giddy glee when someone gets on the train and asks the carriage if the train is going to a certain destination and someone always answers. A look of gratitude exchanged. I will never stop getting excited when I read the comments section on TikTok and someone asks for the name of the song playing in the video, and even if it’s a popular one, someone will always answer. No sassy comments to “find it yourself”. No dismissive, “why don’t you know this”, just a simple answer. In hundreds of thousands of comments someone always answers.
There will always be hard things. Uncertain things. Days when finding moments to laugh feels impossible. We’ll see cruelty and harm caused by human hands. We’ll exist alongside atrocity and many of us will sadly be touched by it. There will be times of sadness. Fear in our bones. But, as Angus Hervey said, “don’t bet against humanity”.
We have the capacity for change, progression and transformation. We have it within us to love, to feel, to explore and discover. We also have coded into the building blocks of our very being, the inherent ability to just be really fucking cute. I hope we never, ever, forget it.
Tell me in the comments: What are your favourite cute things that people do?
I love when black people honor each other with a knowing “hello” when we’re surrounded by white people.
I love when babies look at me intently. I smile and wave and if they are crying, I promise them it will be okay.
I love the honesty and authenticity of children. They are no bs.
Giving sincere compliments to women I don’t know out and about.
“Your haircut is fabulous!”
“You’re killing it in that outfit,Sis!”
Simple things. 🩵
In a time of so much stress and fear and division, this was such a healing piece to read. We ARE all human and we are all walking each other home, even if that’s easy to forget. I once read a book that said there’s a difference between Life and Living. Living is all the Things We Need to Do. Work, clean, cook. And Life is the things in between, the hand holding, letting people know a song title, holding doors open. (I adore the door opening too! It’s so cute!) The book said we need to get a life. To me, this essay was all about that - how to get a Life. Easy to miss or ignore, but ultimately the thing that makes Living worthwhile.