Every Body's Business
I’ll chalk this week up
to being one of a couple medical check-offs. I had a physical yesterday and I am scheduled for
a colonoscopy on Friday. (Don't be jealous!) I’ll spare you the details of both, because nothing
says you’re old more than talking about your health, or lack of it.
But my visit to my doctor provided a reminder of my current read. I am reading Bill Bryson’s book, The Body: a guide for occupants. The book is fascinating at so many levels and has given me a new appreciation for the complexity of the human body. Each chapter addresses a different part of the body and I can tell by how it’s written that Bryson did a ton of research in writing it. It’s a 500+ page book, a size that will usually dissuade me from even checking it out, but I have to say, I am hooked on it.
I find myself telling my wife
and kids some of the trivial facts that are in it.
Things like:
1. The average person blinks
12,000 times a day. Enough time that your eyes are actually closed for more
than 23 minutes a day because of it.
2. You have about 100,000
microbes per square centimeter of your skin.
3. Just sitting quietly,
doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in 30 seconds
than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in 30 years.
4. The brain uses 20% of our
energy and makes up just 2% of our body weight.
5. Your heart beats 100,000
times a day, and as many as 3.5 billion times in a lifetime. Every hour it dispenses
around 70 gallons of blood.
These facts are gobsmacking.
The book makes it clear that every part of the body is a miracle unto itself.
When you put them all together, it screams of a higher power. If we came from a
Big Bang, there’s something out there that did some pretty involved
architecture on the human body. (To say nothing of plants, animals, fish,
rocks, etc.)
The book is a reminder
that when everything is working in synchronicity, life is good. At the same time,
with all of the complexity, it’s really quite a wonder stuff doesn’t go wrong
more often. And don’t get me started on the body’s ability to heal itself. It’s
almost too much to fathom, yet we take it all so for granted and treat out
bodies like we’re renters, not owners.
The fact that I was
reading it lead to an interesting discussion with my doctor. He seemed as awed
by it as me and while he claimed he wasn’t a religious person, he had a hard
time believing that the molecules and cellular level organisms figured
everything out on their own. It does seem a bit of a stretch.
The moral of the story is,
take care of yourself, I guess. Eat right, exercise and get your rest. If you
had any idea of the billions of transactions your body is undergoing even while
reading this blog, well, you’d be gobsmacked too. (I’ve always wanted to write
a blog post and use gobsmacked. So there.)
Today’s musical choice is
the polar opposite of the wonder of life. Zombie, by the Cranberries, featuring
Dolores O’Riordan, one who was taken too early. It was one of my favorites in
the early 90s.
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