A philosophical question
I have many pots on the boil right now, but surely I'm the same me I was before? Aren't I?
Are you the same person today you were yesterday? This rather philosophical question has been bouncing around my head.
I’m going through a time of life changes and when people ask me how that’s going, I tend to say it feels a bit like I’m standing at a stove with an array of pots bubbling away in front of me. I’m trying to attend to them all, while not really knowing what I’m cooking up or even if the various dishes I’m concocting will be edible.
But surely the chef is still the same, day to day? Although my priorities and my routine and the content of my week are all somewhat in flux, aren’t ‘I’ the constant in this life of mine?
Certainly not if you look at ‘me’ as a physical entity. What we eat is broken down into absorbable molecules (proteins, carbohydrates, fats) and these, quite literally, become our body. In yoga, the anamaya kosha is the name for our physical being, the crudest level of our existence, and it translates as ‘food body’. Yup, we’re just a walking accumulation of all the stuff we put down our gullet.
Add onto that our microbiome, which makes up more than half the living cells we call ‘our body’. And these aren’t even human. They’re the magnanimous microorganisms kindly facilitating our life and health. I feel we ought to take a moment to thank these personal, mobile menageries.
Almost every human cell in our body dies and renews itself; some achieve it fairly quickly, and some more slowly over a period of years. Apparently between 60 million and 300 million cells expire in our body every minute1. We are scattering little pieces of ourselves all around us in the form of dead skin cells; we flush our dead gut cells away into the sewage system. The liver takes a whole year to reinvent itself and our skeleton, that seemingly solid and permanent frame, recycles itself every fifteen years2.
Only a select few parts of our physical body remain with us unchanged, day after day and year after year. These are the neurons in our nervous system, our teeth enamel, the lenses in our eyes, plus a tiny bit of bone at the base of our skull3 . Though they are with us from birth to death (assuming you’ve not had eye lens replacement surgery and full dentures, of course), I don’t think we can say that these components reflect the true ‘me’.
Our minds are a cacophany of thoughts that can only be iterations and echos of past experiences or otherwise projections by our imagination into the future. (Yes, mine too, although now and then muted by yoga or meditation practice.)
So if the physical accommodation we are currently housed in is made of the food we eat … and our mind is mostly on the move, surely ‘we’ can’t be the same today as we were yesterday, or even a moment ago.
Is this reassuring or not, I wonder. Someone said to me recently that since we are, within ourselves and in our lives, in a perpetual state of change, of loss and letting go, that we therefore ought to pause and find room to grieve more often.
There is truth in this, and perhaps also in the flipside. Our entire being is a mindbogglingly complex system of patterns and interactions, of renewal and decay, combined with just the right level of unpredictable, completely random creativity that brings forth life. And that is worth wondering at.
Sue Black says it’s about 300 million per minute in her book All That Remains: a Life in Death, while the Karolinska Institute says about one million per second.
According to Sue Black again.
And again.