I’d like to set aside Inspirational music today and talk about body.  In the past couple of months I’ve become aware of how unaware I am of my body.  I go through the day and now and often stop and marvel at this package we carry through life – that carries us.  I’ve actually been even stopping in my tracks occasionally and just standing flabbergasted in wonder at this wondrous instrument we inhabit.

What’s first so incomprehensible to me is that we spend nearly a hundred years in this thing and yet we know very little about it – where it came from, how it works, how we got it.  We didn’t build it, we barely maintain it, we had no part in its design and, especially for me, we live in it unaware of even its basic mechanisms like pancreas, kidney, liver, lungs and heart.

I mean I don’t even know what a pancreas is, what it does or where it is.  I’m sure it’s a good thing and it’s mine, but if I woke up tomorrow morning to find that it was gone, I wouldn’t even care as long as life went on as normal.  I can’t say that about my favorite pen or my i-Pad.

We have no dealings with these vital organs really.  They just work for us until they don’t and we seem to have no control over them except to feed them.  We go to sleep at night and they all keep right on chuggin’ along.  Even when fully awake 99% of the time we pay no attention to them as they go about their business.

One could say they belong to us – organs, muscle, sinew, skin, brain – but we don’t even really manage them much less design and build them.  We know far more about our houses and apartments than we do about our bodies – how they work, how they maintain, how they keep us alive.

It’s probably the oddest thing I’ve thought about in months that we are so distant from the functionality of these things and yet we call them ours.  I know more about my computer and how it works than I know about my body.

And yet it keeps on workin’.  And I keep on using it unawares.  And it actually works extremely well.  Mine’s been a good one.  Only extremely rare visits to the fix-it shop, and even when a repair is necessary, I’ve figured out ways of fixing the mechanics through thought and not medicine, operation or replacement.  Pretty amazing…

Like just now I swallowed a swig of hot chocolate.  Once it went down, I was done with it.  I lost consciousness of that ounce of chocolate and milk and it went on its merry way through the processing plant – the processing plant that I carry around with me, but rarely maintain, hardly ever consider and know nothing about.  Weird!

And then there’s my eyes and ears…  Here are two functionalities that are beyond me.  My brain orders my eyelids to open without anyone, especially me, telling it to and I begin again this wondrous adventure of seeing.  Now who or what ever figured this one out?  I’m grateful for it, it’s a fun thing to do, but the whole concept is so far beyond me that I stand in awe of this precious power that was given to me by something, someone, somewhere.

Hearing is similar.  Millions of little things vibrate, somehow find their way through the air and into this oddly shaped flesh matter on the side of my head and I hear Tchaikovsky’s 5^th Symphony.  Even weirder!

Ah, the mysteries of life.  Medical science seems to have come a long way in figuring much of this out, but I have found that I get along better with this body thing if I don’t listen to or pay attention to their findings.  The less I know, the better.  I’m not really convinced of their intentions, you see.  Having spent 15 years of my life composing for and directing industrial shows for the great pharmaceutical companies and getting an inside look at how they all work, convinced me that there’s a lot of confusion there between philanthropy and greed.

I’ll even go so far as to say that greed led the way far more than it should have.  Medical science clearly has its benefits, but it hasn’t even begun to have all the answers and it’s goals and motives are suspect.

So I’ll try to stay away from that whole mess as long as I can.  And I’ll mute their commercials of dire information and scare tactics simply to protect this mind that sort of governs this precious, but least understood possession called “my body”.

And then there’s the eventual leaving of it behind.  When we’re done, we’re done.  We move on with probably not even a thought and leave it behind to burn or rot in the dust of the ground.  Another completely strange notion.  Its purpose completed, it goes back to the dust from whence it cometh.  It’s not even recycled.

I wish I could leave my brain hard drive behind at least.  I have a humble hope that it might be of some use to somebody somewhere.  I mean I have discovered some short cuts, some truths, some methods of life that work and an especially good list of things not to do.  It might be of some use to somebody!  Perhaps Google would have a small interest.

Ah well…  I guess I haven’t come to much here.  I got excited the other day about writing this post, but see now that I’m not much farther along than I was when I started.  Sometimes it’s good to just get it down.

Here’s perhaps a good one for readership comments.  Can you help clarify here?  What do you think about all this?  Or do you think about it at all?

Let me know.  In the meantime, I’m here, in this body, wondering what it’s all about.