Before religion had names, humans were already changing.
We scaled across geography and time—
following water, food, safety, survival.
Small groups became tribes.
Tribes became settlements.
Settlements became civilizations.
At every expansion, something practical was gained.
And something human quietly stretched past its limit.
The human body knows proximity.
Faces. Voices. Memory. Consequence.
But population growth pushed us beyond what we could feel.
We could think larger than we could hold.
So we adapted.
Scale → Systems → Control → Drift
Scale needed systems.
Systems needed control.
Control wasn’t cruelty.
It was compensation.
When people became too many to know, we organized them.
When suffering became too vast to feel, we abstracted it.
When responsibility exceeded the body, we distributed it into roles.
Care became governance.
Wisdom became law.
Presence became process.
And drift began.
Not moral drift.
Human drift.
From relationship to regulation.
From discernment to judgment.
From shared burden to enforced compliance.
Humanity didn’t become evil.
It became overextended.
Adaptation Was Survival — and It Had a Cost
Drift was not failure.
It was how we survived scale.
Rules replaced listening.
Categories replaced knowing.
Control replaced trust.
Every civilization reached the same quiet realization, regardless of culture:
We are too many for ourselves.
When presence became impractical,
systems learned to distrust those who still spoke from it.
Non-linear speech became suspect.
Tenderness became inefficiency.
Unprotected humanity became a liability.
This is where forgetting truly began.
The Appearance of the Perfect Human
Then, late in the human story—
after migration, empire, law, religion—
a human appears who does not adapt.
Jesus does not arrive with a system to manage humanity.
He does not offer a better abstraction.
He simply remains human.
In a world shaped by distance, he chooses proximity.
In a world governed by control, he refuses armor.
In a world numbed by scale, he feels fully.
Love without boundaries.
Forgiveness without limits.
Kindness without expectations.
Not as ideals.
As embodied risk.
Remaining human at scale does not go unnoticed.
It is resisted.
Grace is not softness.
It is presence without guarantees.
And systems do not know what to do with that.
Perfection, Reclaimed
Perfection was never moral flawlessness.
It was unfractured humanity.
Nothing in him needed to be hidden.
Nothing needed to be justified.
Nothing needed to be scaled, defended, or explained away.
He treated each person as if scale had never happened.
One leper.
One woman.
One child.
One enemy.
This kind of humanity is not sustainable at population scale.
Which is why it is punished.
Remembered — and Managed Away Again
Those who lived near him didn’t receive doctrine.
They experienced remembrance.
Something ancient stirred:
This is what being human feels like.
They carried it forward through practice—
meals, care, shared life.
But scale returned.
Distance returned.
Systems formed to protect what presence once carried.
The story was named.
Codified.
Guarded.
And once again, the system eclipsed the human it emerged from.
Not because the system failed—
but because no system can carry what only humans can.
The Drift Reappears (Closer to Home)
The pattern did not end with history.
As our world scales digitally,
community itself is increasingly framed
not as something we belong to,
but as something we build—often as a way to survive.
Belonging becomes strategy.
Care becomes content.
Presence becomes platform.
Communities are optimized.
Stories are curated.
Connection is measured by reach.
This, too, often begins innocently.
People are trying to live.
To be seen.
To find meaning in a crowded world.
But when community becomes a means to an end,
living quietly turns into performing connection.
We mistake audience for intimacy.
Engagement for relationship.
Visibility for being held.
This is not living together.
It is surviving at scale—again.
Staying human asks something different.
That community remain a place where
no one is extracting,
no one is branding,
no one is turning belonging into leverage.
Where presence is not monetized.
Where care does not need an outcome.
Where life is shared, not scaled.
How I Remembered (and Why It Frightened Me)
I didn’t remember the perfect human through institutions or instructions.
I remembered him through her.
Many people said my grandmother wasn’t all there
because of the things she spoke.
Her words wandered.
They circled.
They arrived without explanation or sequence.
She didn’t speak in systems.
She didn’t speak in strategies.
She spoke in fragments, stories, gestures—
often out of time, out of order.
But it was exactly those things that stayed with me.
Her words didn’t optimize meaning.
They carried it.
Love without calculation.
Forgiveness without accounting.
Kindness without return.
Not taught.
Lived.
Where he showed me what a human could be in the world,
she showed me how that humanity feels when it is held.
He revealed the form of unfractured humanity.
She carried its pulse.
He stayed human amid scale.
She stayed human amid forgetting.
And in 2025—
when scale, systems, and control finally reached inside my own body—
when I began to fragment the way history fragments us all—
it wasn’t doctrine that revived me.
It was remembrance.
And yes, I feared the cost of that remembrance.
I feared being branded the way she was—
unreliable, unsound, not all there—
simply for speaking from somewhere systems can’t manage.
But being misunderstood by systems
is not the same as being lost.
A Wish for 2026
As another year turns,
my wish is not for clarity, certainty, or control.
It is for remembrance.
That we might notice where scale has taught us to numb,
where systems have asked us to speak less truthfully,
where control has been mistaken for care.
That we might forgive ourselves
for the ways we adapted just to survive.
And that, in small and ordinary moments,
we might choose presence again—
even when it is inefficient,
even when it cannot be explained,
even when it risks being misunderstood.
May we recognize the perfect human
not as someone to worship from a distance,
but as a mirror held close.
And may we carry that humanity into the year ahead
gently, bravely, and without armor—
love without boundaries,
forgiveness without limits,
kindness without expectations.
If 2026 asks anything of us,
may it be this:
To stay human.
Not perfectly.
Not constantly.
Just honestly.
Because staying human is not nostalgia.
It’s resistance.
It’s remembrance.
It’s the counter-code.
And it has been. Always.