As we age, our hair falls out and typically regrows up to a certain age.We shed skin, but it too regrows. We cut nails only to see them reappear within weeks. Our taste buds change about every ten days. Spine takes the longest time to change. By the end of seven years, we don’t have a single cell in our body that we had seven years ago. They are all new, reborn but older in some way – we are not who we were. Still, it would be naive for us to believe that there is a complete do-over in life; mostly, we settle for what little we have.
If you have already inhaled two decades of air into your lungs, then you would hope that by now we must be getting better at dealing with change. Sometimes we are, but often we condition ourselves to ignore. We put pressure on our minds to forget, and we cunningly develop elaborate, fabricated stories to tell others and to keep the influence of change at bay. Unknowingly, we merge into an impulsive herd of directionless motion. We become captives of conformity. We stop noticing the perfume we are wearing because of our adaptation to the smell. And long before Alzheimer’s kicks in, many of us, we almost all simulate some amnesia. All these actions demonstrate how our biology adapts to cope with change, allowing us to feel alive during the remaking of our anatomy by the sheer force of change.
Then there is the wall of insulation we build with self-proclaimed lies and impurity. We act this way not only to deceive others but also to declare that we are moving, floating with the tides of life. We do these for ourselves. Amidst all the absurdity in our environment, we don’t want to lose the only cohort we have. We don’t want to lose ourselves.