How Do You Guys Feel About Your Bodies This Time?
Because they’re actually quite brilliant. Some people are going to convince you that your body is a disgusting, smelly chunk of decaying flesh and your job as a human is to deal with it until your inevitable death. It’s a lovely incentive for existing, but it isn’t quite true when you really consider what your body does.
Sure, on a large enough time-scale, it’s a decaying chunk of blood and flesh. While it’s hurdling for that final moment of decay though, it spends an enormous amount of time growing and creating. Your body is an amazing little machine, running off only what surrounds it and you put in it. It makes a vast number of tiny calculations over which you have no conscious control. Those little calculations are brilliant in terms of their independence and effectiveness.
Your mind is rarely completely distracted by your body. Sure, you get the occasional ache and pain, but all the little beating and wurring sounds that perpetually keep your everything operating go largely ignored during your day-to-day.
People are afraid of the body, though. We’ve been trained to understand it as the vilest part of our existence. Everyone has been taught that even mentioning the functional use of the body in regular conversation is off-beat and off-putting; such talk should be reserved for bathrooms, bedrooms, medical procedures, and alcohol influenced conversations.
Really concentrate on your body for a minute. It just did a thousand different things to keep you living and you didn’t even have to ask it. That kind of competency should be admired, not shunned. If you actually had to control your body, how quickly do you think you would mess up? If your conscious was suddenly transferred to every splitting cell, beating heart, and churning organ, do you really think you’d make it past a few seconds? Most people can’t walk and text without getting hit by a car, so control down to a cellular level would be catastrophic.
For all the pain and misery that seems to be attributed to it, the body is certainly capable of creating equal measures of pleasure and not being dead. That’s the most important part, you know, the not being dead part. Love it or hate it, that body you think is so terrible and disgusting and smelly keeps you from not being dead—the entire point of existence.
