What am I
I was looking through some discussions on a blog
directory site call Blog Catalog When I stumbled upon a
posting that asked the question: "What do you think you were you in
a previous life." For some reason that posting made me think a
little. I don't believe in reincarnation the way that the question
was proposing so I thought about answering their question in another
way. So well, what was I before what I am right now? This is
the answer I came up with:
I was one a bunch of tiny pieces of
particles riding a massive frozen ball of iron flying through space
at 50k miles an hour until I was grabbed by Jupiter's gravity and
swung into a ball of rock called Earth. As soon as I had entered
Earth's thick atmosphere the frozen ball of iron I was on, grew
hotter and hotter until it completely exploded and of all my tiny
pieces were scattered in every direction all across the planet.
From there, over time, I have become a part of many things in many
places. And over the course of a billion years or so my pieces
slowly came back together until this very moment. For this very sort
moment of time is the only time my body will be what it is right
now. Soon it will lose a skin flake or burn a calorie and the
particles within my body will have changed. Every particle in my
body has been replaced and exchange a billion times over; thus meaning I
am not the same stuff I was a year ago. Every second I am a little
different.
Meaning that at one time or another the particles that make up my
body, including my brain and the electrical signals being
transmitted by it, have probably been a part of everything on this
planet and beyond.
Throughout my life I have spent a lot of time wondering what makes me, me. Is it my brain, or my brain cells? Is it the stuff I am made of? Well it cant really be that. Like I mentioned before, every piece of my body is constantly being replaced as I consume and burn energy. This includes every particle that makes up my brain. Cells continually renew themselves using the nutrients they get from the blood and it's a really good thing they do. Without that continual regeneration we would not last very long as living things. Even right now I am not the exact same makeup of particles as I was when I started writing this article. How I'm not certain of this but there may be a possibility that one year ago I was almost a completely different 'thing,' or conglomerate of particles. So the answer I have settled on for now is that what makes me, me is really the information my brain has stored through out my life, the patterns my brain has put together based on all the observations it has made all through my life. However this too means that I am always in a state of change as my brain is always collecting, storing, and applying info to pattern 'databases', while I live my daily life. But like our cells, maybe it's a very good thing that we are continually renewing ourselves.