Beliefs about my body

The latest from xkcd is particularly awesome:

I am an organ donor. When i die, i want my body donated. Take what other people can use from it, and then send it on to science, where it can be used to teach medical students or further some understanding of whatever’s applicable.

My grandfather died when i was 2; he had lymphatic cancer, and when he died, he donated his body to science in the hopes of furthering understanding of cancer and such. When my grandma died three years ago (of nothing other than old age – she was 93), we did the same thing. I was not able to be there when she was dying, but i was able to get into town the next day. My dad and i went to the hospital to take care of whatever paperwork needed to be done; when they asked if we wanted to see the body, neither my dad nor i had any interest. Partly because we didn’t want that to be our last memory of her (my dad was also out of town when she died), but also: she wasn’t in there anymore. It was just the shell that, at one point, happened to house one of our favorite souls on the planet.

We told them that, as per her wishes, we wanted her body donated to science. I was more than a little dismayed to find out that this was such a rare request that they had to actually make an hour’s worth of phone calls to find out what all was involved in the process.

I view my body as the temporary housing of my soul. I like to decorate it with piercings and tattoos, because really: who moves into a house and doesn’t decorate? And yet, i have little to no interest in fashion; ironic, perhaps, but that’s another post. My piercings are mostly decorative, but my tattoos are milestone markers – they all tell stories of events and realizations that had a profound impact on my life, on who i am as a person. But again, those stories are a bit of a tangent, so i’ll leave them for a later post.

I do and do not have any huge attachment to my body. Obviously, it’s the only one i have right now, and as such i want to treat it well and keep it in decent working order. I want it to last as long as it can. But here’s where i slightly disagree with the comic i posted above: i don’t subscribe to the belief that when we die, that’s just it. I believe that when i die, my soul will move on to pastures anew – could be another body, could be another level of existence. I dunno. I don’t know if i believe in Heaven/Hell/Valhalla/Nirvana or whatever. I know this much: i can’t prove they don’t exist (given that you can’t prove a negative), but whatever it is that lies beyond, i’m not quite ready to find out for certain.

In a lot of ways, i see my own body as irrelevant. It’s where i live, and so that makes it relevant to this life, to my current life. But it’s not the end-all-be-all, and it’s not the center of the universe; it doesn’t even have to be the center of anyone else’s life. If someone else doesn’t like it? That’s their problem, not mine. If i don’t like it, that’s my problem – not anyone else’s.

Here’s the thing: in the grand scheme of things, i am a speck, standing on a speck of a planet, which is warmed by a star that is a but mere speck in the universe.

Some people (myself included) think of this and see it as awe-inspiring – they marvel at the vast expansiveness of the universe, at the possibilities that such an unimaginably large thing can barely contain. Others see this as a diminishment, as an indicator of their “insignificance”. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it best in his cosmic sermon (which is definitely worth checking out). As he mentions in this speech, he had been contacted by a psychologist who studied the effects of things that made people feel insignificant, and wanted to do a survey with the people who saw one of DeGrasse Tyson’s shows (which involved a ginormous zoom-out from a person to the universe). His response?

“There’s something wrong here. Why does he feel small, but when i look up at the universe, i feel large? Then i realize, the problem is: his ego is too large to begin with. He came to the problem thinking too highly of who and what he was to begin with. Because then, everything that happened in the show destabilized his self-image. Whereas, i know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomenon in the cosmos. And it’s our 15 pounds of gray matter that figured this out!”

Parts of this amazing speech are captured beautifully in this video, Symphony of Science:

Do yourself a favor: don’t just scroll past that video. Watch it. Then watch it again. DO EET NAO. For several weeks now, i’ve been trying to resist the temptation to just post the video and the lyrics and shout BECOME ONE WITH THIS KNOWLEDGE!

And yes, if you watch both the (above-linked) sermon and the music video, you’ll notice that they chopped up DeGrasse Tyson’s speech to make it say something only slightly different:

I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??

It gives me chills just thinking about it. Here’s another awesome quote from Carl Sagan in that video:

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

It makes my throat lumpy to be faced with such beauty, with such an affirmation of the beauty of being made of star stuff. And sure, some of this may sound a bit new-agey, but like DeGrasse Tyson, i’m not going to apologize for the findings of astrophysicists.

An iron meteor created the Barringer Meteorite Crater in Arizona (which is 4,180 feet across and 570 feet deep) some 50,000 years ago. The iron in my blood comes from the same source as the iron in that meteor. In the light of such amazing stuff, i find it mind-boggling that anyone can have the audacity to think things like the size, shape and/or color are valid reasons for discriminating against another human being. Again, i quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson:

We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically

We are all connected. Our own individual atoms are all put together differently, and yet we ultimately have the same origins.