Constituting the confines

Through daily interactions people can easily classify the world.  Things are good or bad.  It’s them or us.  This is mine, not yours. Despite all this classifying, do we really know what it is that define us?  With your finger pointing dutifully at your chest you cheerfully say, “This is me!”  Are you simply constituted by the confines of your skin or is there more?

This biological component you point at with such vigor is an assortment of chemicals interacting in a regulated system that we call life.  But this system cannot endure in and of itself.  It requires constant and continual interactions outside of this assumed parameter.  The internal require the external.  Without this flux of external with the internal, the system fails.   There is death.

But even in death, the external forces continue to interact, as the chemicals breakdown.  The body is decomposed, whether by bacteria, worms, or fire.  All the chemicals that were once one thing will eventually be something else.  That something else will in time, as the cycle continues, eventually be renewed in yet another thing.

When you point at yourself and think “me”, we can try to limit it to all the chemicals currently composing that body.  It that sense, you are essentially just mass.  Try holding your breath.  Keep holding.  As the imperative for breathing mounts, you soon realize that you need –absolutely require– air.  When defining you, any definition that fails to encompass your breath leaves you, quite frankly, dead.

What about that stuff in your stomach?  Is that part of you?  Certainly, if it isn't yet, it soon will be.  Without nutrient, the body will wither away and die.  While you may be easily distinguishable from the surroundings, the surroundings are continuously becoming part of you, as you are becoming part of the surrounding. 

It’s been commonly asserted that it only takes seven years to totally recompose a body with all new molecules.  Granted, you may think that you’re looking through the same blue eyes; nevertheless, you’re not.  Even the very molecules that compose your DNA –your genetic component– are in flux.   You may seem static but you’re always changing. 

When defining things, it can seem like a black and white issue; however, all things are part of systems.  There is grey everywhere.  If you trace the interactions, you’ll see that everything is invariably connected.

Everything is connected.