THINK ABOUT IT

THINK ABOUT IT

If you could see your body as it really is, you would never see it the same way twice. Ninety-eight percent of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago. The skeleton that seems so solid was not there three months ago. The configuration of the bone cells remains somewhat constant, but atoms of all kinds pass freely back and forth through the cell walls, and by that means you acquire a new skeleton every three months.

The skin is new every month. You have a new stomach lining every four days, with the actual surface cells that contact blood being renewed every five minutes. The cells in the liver turn over very slowly, but new atoms still flow through them, like water in a river course, making a new liver every six weeks.

It is as if you lived in a building whose bricks were systematically taken out and replaced every year. If you keep the same blueprint, then it will still look like the same building. But it won't be the same in
actuality.

As non-change, the body is solid and stable, like a frozen sculpture. As change, it is mobile and flowing, like a river.

Science has accepted essentially a frozen, geometric way of mapping out everything that happens in the material world, so quite naturally the idea of the sculpture took precedence over the idea of the river. But the river has not stopped just to please science - the beauty of the human body is
that it is new every moment.

BY

PETER FELISTER