The Real Me

How old am I?

Who cares. Ok. How old are you?

Your body’s cells and fluids live, die and regenerate anew. The physical

composition of your living body now, is a different package than a

decade ago. In the span of less than ten years, most cells of most

components of your body die, disintegrate, and are replaced by new

molecular material. Your thirty-year-old body was a different physical

being than your twenty-year-old version which was different than your

ten-year-old version. Yet, you were considered the same person

throughout, just older.

What’s the you? What got older if all cells are new? What was you years

ago and is still you today? What throughout your life is the same “you”,

and just gets older?

The retention and collection of your experiences.

Human life is time embodied.

Life as an individual person is experiences recorded and stored in a

human capsule. My body absorbs, processes and records its moments,

which I can recall, at will, or sometimes even against my will. Every

moment is collected somewhere within me; some labeled and stored for

recall, others just sit in a cell, unlabeled, maybe washed and rinsed

during my dreams, maybe stored as a single sock, to one day find its lost

mate and become a solid memory, or discarded.

Nothing and no one, other than me, experiences exactly what I

experience. My unique perspective of what I experience, behind my eyes

and between my ears, in my body, using my unique senses, housed by

my unique DNA, gets recorded, and, to survive the journey of my life,

gets handed off by a dying cell to a newly born cell as inherited baggage,

stored and catalogued. My recorded experiences remain mostly intact,

through multiple handoffs of generations of cells.

Some things might get lost because the hand-off wasn’t successful.

Others are intentionally devalued and die with their housing cells,

not deemed worthy enough to be transferred to a new replacement memory cell.

When I die, my body’s cells, originally integrated to comprise a

functioning structure of a body with organs, will dis-integrate into

individual, primordial building blocks. My body’s base elements -

oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, etc. - will become part of

the universe’s general pool of elements, to become part of other cellular

structures. My body’s energy - that which is within me as a living

functional human, and then no longer in it after my last breath - diffuses

into the universe’s pool of energy, to perhaps energize something else.

This is true for everyone and every package of life form. The universe’s

matter and energy, simply (or not so simply) continually change

locations and formations, but don’t disappear. They dis-integrate and

sometimes re-integrate. Everything of everyone changes into something

else, somewhere else.

Except one thing: My memories.

Everything I uniquely experienced as I did from inside me, starts and

ends with me.

An individual life story is therefore highly fragile, personal and

priceless. Its person’s body holds it like a precious heirloom – a floating,

disembodied-but-embodied, one-of-a-kind, growing collection of

experiences, thoughts and emotions - maintained and cultivated

through successive generations of cells, within its unique living

ecosystem.

The “Me” that began when I took my first breath, which lives and ages

throughout my life, and which ends and disappears with my last breath,

is my accumulated record of experiences. That, not my recycling and

changing body, is the “real” me. Upon my death, while my body’s

physical components and energy will move on, my story, my version of

it, the only true version of my life experience, will actually disappear.

That is, unless I write of it while I am.