Birds do it, Bees do it_there is a catch...

Be kind to your mind and others. 

Billions have passed before you, 

and yet you are unique.”

-   Anonymous

 

I wake up almost every morning with a song running through my head…not an earworm, but rather something random. 

This morning, it was Ella Fitzgerald singing Let’s Do It, a catchy Cole Porter tune about falling in love that I haven’t thought of in over fifty years. Many of you have probably not heard of this song, the writer or singer. Porter, a prolific composer, died in 1964, and Fitzgerald, an equally gifted singer, died in 1996.

The lyrics say that in addition to untold numbers of living creatures, people also do it (e.g., Spanish, Lithuanians, Dutch, Finns, Bostonians, to name a few).

The song is about falling in love…falling in love, yeah, about that. The euphemism for, you know, doing it.

 

Moments before the sun…

Sitting in the backyard this morning, I thought about this. Not so much about falling in love, but the ability to know we are in love. We, of all creatures, great and small, do not just react to fundamental urges to mate and reproduce, or survive through primal instincts. We have thoughts, feelings, and the ability to make conscious choices. This allows us to share things with other people. It enables us to take thoughts from different places and combine them into new ideas. It allows us to accumulate and act on the input we receive in highly creative ways… and maybe even fall in love.

Consciousness allows us to consider more than just ourselves. 

Not in a passive way, but with the tools of faith, curiosity, and imagination, drive a journey of expectations full of unforeseen twists and turns. Robert Frost, the American poet, once wrote, "The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected."

 

Just thinkin’…

Consciousness is fed by the sensory side of our brains, the input from touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. These sensations tell us about the world around us. In the liquid chemistry of consciousness, decisions are made to react to what has entered our minds. Output through the nervous system follows and helps build bridges with others (e.g., verbal, writing, gestures, and facial expressions).

 

It's overwhelming…

Over the past few years, I have taught courses in the complex, often mysterious body in which we live. I have come to appreciate its intricacy. Our bodies have several trillion cells, coordinated and communicating in ways that support life. 

This living machine has but one purpose: to support the brain so that it can observe and interact with the world into which we have been born…a living, organic computer that is the world in which we live.

In the day-to-day grind, with all of the difficulties and opportunities we face, it is easy to forget, or maybe not even know, how remarkable this ability is. Little doubt a gift.

 

Just chemistry, amigo…

Of the top six elements in the universe, our bodies share four (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen). We are stardust. Our blood is chemically related to the oceans. Yep, our bodies are not much more than cosmic dust and seawater!

In the vastness of the universe, none of these particulate elements has any sense that they exist. They have never had desires, wants, or sensations, felt beauty, or love.

And yet…and yet in this limitless cosmos, a collection…a distillation of these elements has found its way into minds with more neurons than stars in the Milky Way. Minds that have the unfathomable gift of consciousness that permits feelings, desires, wants, and the ability to act on them.

If we think the universe of galaxies is amazing, what is hiding inside our minds is even more so. 

Marcus Aurelius, in his meditations, says:

“You wander about and visit temples and tombs 

and open the eyes of your body to sights, but 

you close your eyes of your mind.”

 

Hard to believe…

Think for a moment how fortunate we are. Not just that we have consciousness, but that these words have been written and read by you. Of the billions of our species that have lived, none of our relatives died prematurely from disease, war, famine, or catastrophic accident before producing surviving offspring, our ancestors, leading to our existence. In the lottery of life, the odds that we are alive in this moment are astronomical.

 

It’s a miracle we are here. It is more of a miracle that we have the capacity to know it.

- ted