There was a fantastic & fun contest I entered: Dear Aliens
I did not win, but I truly enjoyed playing the game.
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This is what they wanted. The premise is that aliens are coming and they are only going to read one document before they get here. But you don’t need to take it too seriously.
It had to be under 1000 words.
What a fun one!
I recommend you check out the winning pieces here: Dear Aliens
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In the meantime, one of the perks of not winning is getting to publish my submission here!
Hence, for your reading pleasure (Aliens, I'm talking to you) following is >1000 words of what I wanted you to know:
Humans will take everything you are, chew it up and spit it out, as proof of being right.
Religion, science, peace and war, politics, behavior, love: our brains take on the role of evidence gathering for our beliefs.
We listen, watch, read, and think like this. Everything coming in is used as building material for proving our point.
I didn’t expect to write this. Why welcome you to our world with what sounds like a warning? Heck, I’d rather introduce you to our humour! What a fun way to say welcome, I hope you come in peace.
But jokes do not translate well, and opinions are rampant here where humour is concerned. It is true, humour is powerful. Where we find frivolity does provide layers of meaning and influence -
In fact, it was a laugh that gave me the insight regarding humanity’s distinct distraction of wanting to be proven right.
Someone nearby me laughed just as I was feeling down about myself, and the first thing I heard myself think was, “Are they laughing at me?”
Yet, in another mood I could have thought, “Laughter, what a wonderful thing!”
You see, we even want to prove ourselves right about how wrong we are, if that’s the mood we’re in.
Do you understand moods? Is that a concept you live with?
I’m not certain it can be explained if you do not know it - but it is mainly what we humans are, layers of moods.
Our basic personality is the foundation, and then our environment offers material we use to build the rest - it is a continuous act of proving ourselves right and our moods generally dictate the proof we choose and how we use it. (There are multiple upheavals along the way, times we choose or discover an idea to change in ourselves and hence prove ourselves right in a new direction, proving we were wrong. When we do this it can grant us a deeper understanding of our fellow humans, but it is always, to various degrees, painful.)
So, if you meet with our leaders, our local communities, our academics or spiritual teachers, you will be meeting with curious kind people who want to learn from you and who want to have open minds, but we just don’t quite know how.
You may communicate something clearly, you may find the most precise and perfect way to tell us something, yet we will inevitably receive it without precision. The filters in us - as individuals as well as within our myriad of labels - will edit, adjust, and contort. In part because we are only capable of understanding what we can understand, but also because we must prove ourselves right.
We don’t do this consciously, for the most part. And though I hope that will help you forgive us, I also know it is what makes it harder for us to change.
Oh, I hope this hasn’t made us seem frightfully dim or without agency. We are quite bright! Our talents, sciences, emotions, and industries are an impressive feat of teamwork and individuality.
Is this a concept you understand? Individuality?
It is quite messy.
You will see it, I’m sure, if you have sight: we are who we are, but we display it by how we look.
The biology of our bodies, our organic selves that live and die, are what we move around in. It is not separate from who we are, our moods and beliefs are made manifest in the bodies we carry - and each body feels differently. Some have chronic pain, some do not move at all, all are born different in look and/or feel, ability and/or function, some more drastically so than others.
It is impossible for me to guess whether you will see our bodies as weirdly similar to each other (or yours!) or mind bogglingly different from each other (and yours!) but here on our planet we compare, notice, think about, and decorate our bodies. (Do you have bodies?)
Us human individuals feel a funny mix of needing to fit in while standing out, part of the messiness I was referring to. You may meet some of us who are entirely focused on appearance and many of us who barely are, but we are. (Note: Not all of us have the ability to see, so for the blind "appearance" plays a different role.)
The bodies themselves are judged and decorated; the outfits we put on them are judged and dissected for meaning.
This reminds me: we murder each other.
I don’t know if this seems natural and right to you and your kind, or abhorrent. It is certainly one of the things we will all want to know, and when you tell us we will certainly filter it, twist and turn it, and build it into an argument to prove ourselves right.
Those of us who detest murder for any reason, those of us who see the value in it, we will all use what you say as ammunition for our own beliefs.
Oh, some of us will likely have one of those previously mentioned upheavals. You will communicate, we will be in an uncommonly open mindset, and voila! We will shift, growing painfully and beautifully by a dimension or two.
It is unusual for me to think I have something to share. In life I have mostly been reluctant to try. I mean, I am nobody here. I am alone with my baby, I have no mate or money, I have no transportation or home, I am mostly hiding from the world in an abandoned car while feeding us on scraps and breast milk. But my baby, my son, looks at me with his dark eyes and trusts me to know what he needs, how to teach him and care for him.
It was while wondering what I thought he needed to know, while imagining myself communicating to my son what I believe to be true, using observations and evidence collected over my lifetime, that your communication request reached me; stirred me.
I have a notebook, in it I doodle and make note of what I’ve found for us to eat, and in the back there are two beautiful blank pages.
Were two blank pages.
You, like my son, will be new here.
This is what I feel you might need to know.
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