Life Feeds on Life: The Cost of Being Alive

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of human existence lately.

It feels like the path—if there is one—is something like this:

First, know yourself.
Then, learn to love and accept other people.
Then, maybe, you can begin to understand and love God.

I don’t think you can skip steps. I don’t think you can jump straight to God without doing the work of understanding yourself and wrestling with other people first.

I’ve done a lot of work on the first part. I know myself pretty well. Maybe too well sometimes.

The second part is harder.

I love people. I really do. But I don’t always trust them. And I’m not as accepting as I’d like to be.

And I think part of that comes from something I can’t shake.

You ever drive down the road and just notice everything we ignore?

Trash on the side of the street.
Dead animals that have been hit and left there.
The quiet evidence that we’re not really living in a way that reduces harm—we’re just moving fast enough not to think about it.

One time my ex-wife saw a kitten in the road that had been half run over, still alive.

I didn’t see it myself, but the image has stuck with me anyway.

And I keep coming back to the same question:

Was that anyone’s fault?

Probably not. The person who hit it likely didn’t mean to. Most people aren’t out here trying to cause harm.

But the harm still happened.

And that’s what bothers me.

We live in systems where harm is constant, but mostly unintentional. We eat animals without thinking about the process. We consume things without seeing where they come from. We move through the world without really stopping to consider the impact of any of it.

And I get it—because if you really let yourself feel all of it, it’s overwhelming.

So most people don’t.

Maybe they can’t.

Maybe they don’t want to.

Maybe part of me doesn’t want to either.

Because it’s hard to be this aware and carry this much empathy. It makes everything heavier. It makes it harder to just exist without questioning everything.

It even makes me think differently about prayer.

Prayer has been turned into something routine for a lot of people—something you say before a meal or at church without really thinking about it.

But I don’t think that’s what it was meant to be.

I think it was meant to be a pause.

A moment of gratitude, yes—but also a moment of awareness.

A moment to recognize that something had to be given for you to continue.

That food didn’t just appear.
That life feeds on life.
That survival always comes with a cost.

And maybe prayer, at its best, is about not looking away from that.

Not in a way that crushes you—but in a way that keeps you honest.

I don’t think the answer is to shut all of this off.

I think the work is learning how to see clearly without being crushed by what you see.

To accept that people aren’t usually evil, just disconnected.

To accept that you’re part of the same system you question.

To try, in whatever small ways you can, to live a little more consciously.

And maybe that’s where the second step really is—not blind acceptance of others, but understanding them well enough to stop expecting them to be something they’re not.

Still working on that.

Still trying to figure out how to hold all of this without letting it harden me.

If there’s a path, I think I’m somewhere in the middle of it.