Wholeness Was Never the Absence of the Human Condition

I was rubbing my son’s belly the other day while he had a stomach bug, watching his eyes track the room with that unmistakable softness babies have—the kind that feels both ancient and entirely new at once. There is something about looking into a baby’s eyes that stops thought mid-sentence. Not because they are empty, but because they are so full. So complete.

When I look at him, I don’t see potential. I don’t see who he might become. I see wholeness—intact, unmistakable, present without effort. It’s the same wholeness I write about in The Process of Unbecoming: not something earned through healing or growth, but something inherent, woven into being human itself.

And yet, as I sat there with him, that wholeness was sharing space with a very human reality. His stomach hurt. His body was uncomfortable. He was tired and fussy and out of rhythm.

This is where the tension often appears for us—the place where we quietly assume something has gone wrong.

We tend to imagine wholeness as something fragile, something that should shield us from pain, sickness, fear, grief, or disruption. When the human condition asserts itself, the reflex is to interpret it as evidence of loss. As if discomfort means disconnection. As if suffering means wholeness has somehow fractured, but wholeness was never the absence of the human condition.

One of the central principles in my work is that the human condition exists within wholeness, not outside of it. Wholeness does not sit on the other side of fluctuation, contradiction, or imperfection. It is the ground within which all of that unfolds.

Watching my son, that truth felt visceral rather than conceptual. His body was navigating something unpleasant, and yet nothing about him felt diminished. His eyes were still open. His presence was still whole. His being had not been compromised by the experience of being human. This is the paradox we often struggle to hold.

We are taught, implicitly and explicitly, to sort our experience into what belongs and what doesn’t. Calm, clarity, joy, and connection are welcomed as signs that we are doing something right. Fear, sadness, illness, ambivalence, or fatigue are treated as problems to fix, signals that we’ve lost our way.

But the human condition was never meant to be tidy.

Bodies get sick. Nervous systems fluctuate. Grief arrives without invitation. Joy leaves without explanation. None of this interrupts wholeness. None of it stands in opposition to it. Wholeness is not proven by how life feels; it remains intact regardless of the momentary state moving through us.

This is especially clear with babies because they haven’t yet learned to evaluate themselves through their experience. They haven’t drawn conclusions about what their discomfort says about who they are. They haven’t mistaken pain for defect or struggle for failure.

Over time, most of us do. We turn away because adaptation is part of being human. We learn to manage ourselves in response to our environments. We learn which expressions are welcome, which states need to be contained, which feelings are inconvenient. Gradually, we begin to relate to our own humanity as something that needs supervision.

What we forget in that turning is not wholeness itself, but our access to it.

This is why one of the lived truths that emerges in the work is that wholeness is shared. We often remember it not by looking inward harder, but by witnessing it in another. A baby. A partner. A stranger. Someone else’s presence reminds us of what we recognize without needing to define.

Looking at my son doesn’t make me more whole. It reminds me that I already am.

Maybe this is the longing so many people carry—the feeling of wanting to come home without knowing where home is supposed to be. The sense that something essential is intact, even when life feels messy or painful or unresolved. When I look at him, I see that home has never been lost. It has only been obscured by the effort to manage being human.

We all began this way. Open. Complete. Inhabiting our bodies without interpretation. Life eventually asks more of us than we can meet without adapting, and so we turn away for a while. That turning is not a mistake. It’s part of the journey.

Return is always possible, not by eliminating the human condition, but by allowing it to exist within the wholeness that was never dependent on perfection to begin with.