The urban legend is that after so many years all of the body’s cells have been replaced. This is just a legend. While most of the cells in the body are replaced the brain is not. If the cells of the brain were on a cycle to change at a determined time, the brain would lose its memories. You would no longer be you. Imagine if your sense of balance was changed out, you’d just lay on the ground drooling; that is if your brain remembered how to make saliva.
Cells are constantly being cycled. We eat and breathe, as the atoms come in from the environment outside of us, they get incorporated to make more cells and the destroyed cells break down to atoms for ejection back into the environment. Through this cycle the body still manages change. The cells slow down as we age and need less material. The death process for humans starts around the age of 27 or 28.
So, if we consume atoms and incorporate them into our body we become a part of where the food grew from. We ingest the pollution our food did as well. But the minerals on the ground came from the sky. The Earth was built upon asteroids and comets that clumped together. Stars forged them from all over in space. We are all made of the same material and in constant exchange with each other. We are all the same. We are. Only nature exists.
3 comments:
We are - in fact - the cosmos itself.
Each a microcosm of the macrocosm.
As above, so below.
The mystery!
I thought the death process began about eight years earlier. Oh joy, I'm not dying quite yet.
I wouldn't say we are all the same--since, as you point out, there is a difference between, say, Bob's memory-stream and my memory-stream--but we are all a part of the same process, and it is the process altogether that is beautiful. Within the process there is creation and destruction, but the process itself is never destroyed, for it is what is.
My understanding is that the cells balance out around the early to mid 20's before declining towared the later 20's. Don't push me toward death faster then necessary. :D
I like the name Cloudberry, it is one of the few berries that grow north of the artic circle. Taste like bland apples.
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