It’s an everyday event for all of us. In fact, it is an every second event. Cells die, and are replaced every second of every day. In the course of seven years, our bodies will be completely transformed by this ceaseless process. The replacement cells are always slightly less capable than the cells they replace.
That’s why we age.
Good nutrition, regular exercise, and a positive outlook will help keep our aging bodies in better shape. It will not stop the aging. We are not so much souls contained by bodies, as we are souls caught up in an ongoing event. Every part of this world is event rather than stuff.
Transformation is the rule, not the exception.
Even, “hard”, material such as glass is actually in motion. Gravity pulls it downward. If you look at a windowpane from
a hundred years ago you will see that it has sagged. There will be some rippling visible, and the bottom of the glass will be thicker than the top. Glass is a slow-moving liquid. It’s seeming solidity is an illusion of time. Everything is in motion, all the time. Some motion is too slow for us to notice, some is too fast.
Scientific instruments have revealed many of these motions that are beyond the discernable range of our senses. Will they one day reveal all? Probably not. But what they have revealed so far, should make us more humble than certain.
If I look into a mirror on any given date, I will not be looking at myself. I will be looking at a snapshot in time - myself - after the second before, and before the second later. So, what am I? What are any of us? We are innocents swirling through a mystery of effervescent illusion; bubbles floating along an uncharted current.
Oddly, we don’t notice.
We are so caught up in the illusion that we ignore what demonstrable science has validated to be true. Sure, the world is round, but it looks flat from here.
Well, maybe we can exploit this strange reality, just as humans have exploited every reality they ever encountered. If we’re going to be different in the next second than we were the second before, then we have opportunities - every second - to be better than we were before. That exponentially expands the possibility of actually becoming better. Yes, yes, it’s only a difference of perception, but perception changes attitude, and attitude changes being.
If we cannot stop transformation, maybe we can guide it. Maybe we can age with grace, like a good pair of blue-jeans, like
a beautiful woman, like vintage wine. The novelist, Herbert Gold, wrote, “The grape gives its best when it is squeezed, trampled, fermented; I seem to be turning not into wine but a raisin on the floor, dry, hard, stale, and pushed to and fro by ants”. That’s sad, but not inevitable.
Whither we transform into fine wine, or a dry hard raisin is determined by the state of our soul. We can choose. We can adjust our attitude.
Maybe that’s what we were put in this world to do.