The saying that you can never step into the same river twice, as the flowing river is constantly changing, is doubly true. It’s not just the river that has changed; the you who steps into it the second time is different from the you of the time before.
The adult human is made of over 37 trillion cells. That’ s more than the number of seconds in a million years. Each day some 330 billion cells, or about one percent, are replaced by your body in a process of continual renewal.
Your body cells, like all matter, are made up of atoms of which you have seven octillion, that is 7 followed by 27 zeros. We change 98% of all our atoms every year.
“When I look at people, I think “Wow, you are such incredible organisms’, and our atoms share the same deep history that goes back to the Big Bang… even the simplest cell is incredibly complex and worthy of great respect.”
The origins of the atoms our bodies are composed to the incredibly violent birth of the universe when Cosmos erupted from the womb of Chaos. We, literally, are made of star staff. And when we die, our atoms live on. “They revolve through life, soil, oceans, and sky, in a chemical merry-go-round.”
In this cosmic carnival ride, the atoms which currently compose the fluidity that is our body, came not only from the farthest reaches of space but also walked the earth before, through the long march of evolutionary history.
Atoms can change into sub-atomic particles but cannot be destroyed. This means that some atoms, which once were party of people long departed, are in us, and from us will be passed on to others, like batons in a relay race.
It might give pause to, say, a white supremacist to confront the inconvenient possibility that the atoms of perhaps Martin Luther King Jr are now part of his being. Or for an adherent of Hindutva to think the atomic architecture which once constituted an organism who called himself Aurangzeb, might now be a part of him.
The unitary identity that we call our ‘self’ is a fiction, and ongoing narrative which we invent at a subconscious level, as a necessary device to get on with the practical details of day-today-living, going through the rites of passage, from childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood, receiving an education, earning a livelihood, raising a family.
Sartrean existentialism posits the self as a nullity, an unbound nothingness which comes into existence following the choices it makes. There are no immutable heroes or cowards, saint or sinners. There are only choices between acts of courage or of cowardice between compassion and cruelty.
This ever-changing, ever-changeable you, composed of the integral calculus of the choices you make, is the Unself beyond the Self.
The you is you today has the freedom to choose to be a different you tomorrow.
