Journal Entry: June 17th 2014
September 10th, 2014 • Personal Writing
Today is the 33rd anniversary of the birth of my current human form. It’s my Birthday as conventional thinking goes. 33 years is one way to think about. It’s definitive, linear, concrete, and formal. But, today I’m thinking about my birthday in a different way. I am a human who is the product of 90,000 generations of human evolution. My genetic make-up has been growing, changing, and developing here on Earth for 4.54 billion years.
I have 7.046 billion relatives. My diverse and expansive family has very different attitudes, customs, cultures, beliefs, experiences and emotions. We are all like unique individual snowflakes floating around our world. And yet my families’ DNA the building blocks of our bodies is 99.9% the same. We might all be individual and unique snowflakes, but at the end the day we’re also all still just a bunch of snow.
Today is my birthday and I am 4.54 billion years old. My human bodies mass is 99% made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Another 0.85% is composed of another five elements: potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. Each of these elements were created in explosions during the death of large stars billions of years ago light years away from where I sit now. Trace amounts of these elements help my body function and are a part of my being. I am literally made up of stardust. We all are. In that sense I’m fairly old thinking within our human created convention the linear framework of time.
Today is my birthday I am 13.8 billion and 33 years old today – give or take. That might seem kind of old to you, but I don’t think of it like that. Today is my birthday and I am neither young nor old. I am nothing, I am everything, there is no such thing as time – I am simply alive. For that, I will celebrate this day.