Ashes

I spent my Wednesday evening running from Maghreb prayers, breaking the first fast of Ramadan, to an Ash Wednesday evening service.

I'm thinking today about human frailty. It has been a very frustrating few years to be human. Every day, at least someone talks about the future of software engineering in a world where everything is automated. Increasingly, people in my field feel a sense of futility. We are competing against a machine trained on a corpus larger than we could ever read, that can constantly output without thinking about going on FMLA and taking a sabbatical in Bermuda. When I graduated, a career like mine was a ticket to a solid, upper middle class existence in America. Everyone around me is feeling the automation anxiety-- the possibility that the rug is about to be pulled away from under us.

From ashes you were made, and to ashes you shall return.

Ramadan and Ash Wednesday are intertwined for me today. Ash Wednesday is a reminder of my mortality. For a brief century on this planet (if I'm lucky), life is breathed into a pile of carbon by the divine. A fellow churchgoer spread some ashes in a cross on my forehead to remind me that all I am composed of today will return to the earth.

I find the first day of Ramadan to be a hard one. Acclimating to waking up at the crack of dawn for Suhoor is hard. By the afternoon,hunger and thirst gnaw at me. However, it's in this moment that I'm most aware of my own humanity. After work, I sprinted to catch the train to the city and found myself off-balance, almost falling on another commuter. Moments like these make me remind me of the condition of having a body. One can be conscious, but not aware of the body one occupies.

In this season, my faith is a reminder to me that I was not made to be machine. May this month invite me into new relationship with my body. May I be reminded that I was given a body that craves nourishment, that tires and gets hangry. I will never outcompete a machine at being a machine. I will strive to be a living, breathing being.

I don't have the answers for where things are headed, but I have to believe they lie in a turn toward each other, in mutual recognition of our common frailty.

From ashes we were all made and to ashes we shall all return.