I heart my body

I woke up this morning a little stiff–probably from my son’s baseball practice last night. My first instinct was to complain, but I’ve decided I’m not going to do that. There’s no reason why I should. For a 44-year-old who doesn’t get much strenuous exercise I’m doing well to only have some stiffness, frankly. All things considered, my body’s doing better for me than I deserve.

What’s more, my body works so well that I can easily take for granted all the things it can do. Even my leaky heart valves don’t really get in the way of my doing what I want to do. Oh, my eyes are getting bad enough I may have to give in and get bi-focals, but that’s not really something to complain about, either. “Oh no! I have to adjust these things that help me see clearly so that I don’t have to hold my book six inches farther away from me than normal!” Yeah, reall dramatic, soul-wrenching stuff there.

Think about what our bodies can do. Even with my allergy-wracked nose I can walk in the door and immediately tell what’s for dinner. I don’t think we realize just how much information we take in through just a single sense. Even at night I can tell if that dark lump a block away is a cat, a dog, or a piece of trash in the road. I can distinguish by taste a majority of the ingredients in any dish I eat. I can discern with reasonable accuracy if the music I’m listening to is live or synthesized/sampled. I can feel near-microscopic irregularities in a surface.

Any single sense by itself is amazing. Put them all together and we are capable of incredible things. We take it for granted, but even in this high-tech age we’re still not close to reproducing the same level of sensory discernment at any where close to the same speed at which our body operates. We can get pictures of every single square inch of the world, but it takes a human being to pick out the beginnings of a Chinese aircraft carrier in a massive shipyard (zoom out to see the green arrow).

My body works pretty well, considering. It would be silly to complain when so many out there would love to have a body, defects and all, that works as well as mine. Even being stiff today is really my own fault. I got it from spending some time supporting my son and his team. It was my choice, and a good one. Why complain?

All in all, I’ve got it pretty darn good.