My body is full of cells. Yours is too. These cells do incredible things – there are cells for eyes that work with my brain and the light on the planet so I can see. They turn food into fuel. They walk me around. They’re all marvelous machines, working hard to get it just right. They’re replicating and metabolizing and dying and making way for fresh new cells. Our lives are like this too. We’re here, we do our best, and then we die to make way for new lives.
The cells in my body literally have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t have the sentience to appreciate that they are part of a harmonious whole. My brain has a thought that arises somehow from my brain cells. I want to write it out, so I walk my body over to my computer. I want to type an “M” and my neurons fire to press the key. I press one key, and another, and a million keys, and now I can share ideas. Ideas that you can read and understand. All of this is made possible by cells that don’t know anything about any of this, they think they are just living their lives and trying to do the best job they can at whatever their little cell’s function is, whether it’s thinking or moving or holding me upright. They’re coordinating in this insane symphony that allows me to be a person with dreams and ideas and the ability to share those ideas, to connect with someone who is like me, or maybe very different from me.
My cells don’t know the role they play, but if they could see it, I like to think they’d be impressed. If they knew that their hard work and struggles were to orchestrate the incredible body of a single person, I like to think they’d be blown away by that. That they would feel privileged and happy to be part of something so grand when it feels like just a day-to-day slog, when the mitochondria don’t pump through protein like they’re supposed to, when neighboring cells are unruly and don’t do their jobs and need other cells to clean up after them, when the ATP is more depleted than it ought to be, when the nucleus gives a weird instruction that no one wants to follow and things feel hard for the cell. If they knew how they contributed to this marvelous body, they’d feel happy about that. Even further, I’d like them to think that they are part of a person who’s trying to add some love into the world.
As people dooting around on the planet, we also think we’re just trying to get through the day. To get the kids off to school on time. To hit the deadline. To try for one effing night to get a decent amount of sleep. We’re working hard, but we don’t have a perspective on the whole body. Countless hours, words, ideas, religions have been devoted to wondering what it’s all about. I believe there is actually an answer.
That we make up this planet that is a body. That we fill it with answers to questions, and marvel at the wonders of nature, and pour love onto our fellow beings. And that’s just the people (who are also doing a lot to strip nature of its wonders). All of the plants and animals and mountains are making up this body too, and when you look at it all together, it’s a planet floating along in space filled with all of this incredibleness. Made up of plants, animals and people just trying to get through the day.
And I say that all of these cells function without knowing what it’s all about, but that’s not quite right, is it? There are those few lucky cells that are brain cells, and they have the power of comprehension, that have the good fortune of seeing how all these cells work together to make up the wondrous whole that is me. And maybe there are some of us that understand the whole planetary body, that have the good fortune of understanding how we are all working together to create the miracle that is this life on this planet in the year 2023. Maybe we get there through meditation or other insightful brain work. But some of us get it. Sometimes we can scope out to take in the whole big picture.
It’s mind-blowing enough that my single body is full of these cells that accomplish these wild feats. When I think of all the bags of cells that are other people, and the bags of cells that are all the other living things, and we’re all accomplishing these feats all day every day, it boggles the mind.
The universe is mysterious, but what we do know is that it is so, so vast. Maybe Earth is it for life. But maybe Earth is just a single body – a glorious body with a purpose and a quadrillion little bits of life making it hum – a single body in a whole universe of life, infinite and unimaginable life. From our vantage point as a single cell on the body of the planet, maybe we’ll never be able to see the whole body. But if we could, maybe we’d be blown away, and feel privileged and happy to be part of something so grand.