Merry Christmas! Good snowy white morning to you; we get very excited in Portland, Oregon when it snows. Congratulations on the miracle of being alive. In the second it takes to read this sentence your body will manufacture a million blood cells. Each of these will rattle around your body about 150,000 times delivering the oxygen needed to every cell in your body to make coffee and smiling possible. After which, your red blood cells, tired and battered, will submit to other cells to be quietly killed off for the greater good of you.
It takes about 7 billion billion billion atoms (27 zeros!) to make you. Some 61% of them are oxygen. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous account for 99%. You also have minuscule amounts of molybdenum, vanadium, manganese, tin, copper, thorium, and zirconium. But then again, so does dirt. The only thing special about the elements that make you is that —they make you. That is the miracle of life. Nobody can really say why or how all these materials cooperate in uncountable complicated chemical actions to make you possible. You could take all the smartest people who have ever lived, give them all the scientific knowledge that we have accumulated and they would still not be able to make one living cell, much less you.
This is our Covid-19 isolated family for the holidays. (My son James caught the bug! He is vaccinated and boosted and has only experienced a mild head cold worth of symptoms.) Our bodies are ridiculously complicated monsters of life. They leave the machine metaphor far behind in the dust. Everyday between 1 and 5 of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system finds them and kills them, for the greater good of you. 5 out of 6 smokers won’t get lung cancer. Most people who are prime candidates for getting heart attacks don’t. Your body is constantly healing and maintaining you in myriad ways despite the outlandish things you eat and the amount of time you spend imitating a couch in front of a glowing green screen. Suicide by lifestyle takes decades. The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (Compiled by W.HO.? That’s correct. Third Base!) lists more then 8000 maladies that can kill us and we escape every one of them but one.
My son gifted me The Body by Bill Bryson for Christmas so I shall be plaguing the inter-webs with peculiar bodily facts and statistics for a couple of weeks. It’s the second best popular science book ever and everybody should read it right after they read A Short History of Nearly Everything, also by Mr. Bryson. Half of the above prose is stolen from him and the other half is influenced by his faux-British jocular style.
It has been a wonderful holiday season for us so far. Enjoy the snow, the coffee, the family, the miracle of life. Merry Christmas!