Miracle. All of it.

~ Live & Learn

eye-sleep-face-skin

Each hair on your head is replaced every 2 to 7 years
A hundred hairs fall out every day and new ones grow back in their place

And look at your fingernails – they’re completely new every six months or so

The lining of your stomach and intestines
gets pretty beat up — it’s constantly exposed to acid and bile
and so those cells get replaced every few days

Every few weeks, your outer layer of skin is completely renewed

Every four months you have a fresh army of red blood cells
A hundred million new cells are born every minute and a hundred million old cells are destroyed
It’s actually the breakdown products of these red blood cells that turn your bruises and urine yellow

Every 10 years, you’ve got a new skeleton
a special team of cells breaks down old bone
and another builds new bone

Every 15 years your muscles are refreshed
You might think you gain and lose fat cells when you gain and lose weight
but the actually just get bigger and smaller
Over the course of 25 years though, most of them turn over

But there are a few things that stick around for your entire life

About half of your heart stays with you from birth to death because those cells
are replaced very slowly

Certain parts of your brain add a few new neurons over the course of your life
but the vast majority of your neurons developed before you were born
It’s the connections between those neurons — the circuits that store memories —
that are constantly changing

And there’s one more part of you that lasts your whole life (your eyes)
Months before you were born,
little cluster of cells stretched and filled themselves with transparent protein
As you grew, even after birth, more and more fibers were added, but that center endured
This is your lens the window through which you are watching this video right now
and its core has remained the same since the moment you first opened your eyes

~ Adam Cole and Ryan Kellman, excerpts from Your Body’s Real Age

Notes:

  • Photo:  Bang Sang Hyeok #305 (via Precious Things)
  • Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
  • Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.

 

32 thoughts on “Miracle. All of it.”

  3. I don’t know what’s more incredible…the fact that all this is going on, as it should, day after day, our bodies working as they were meant to, or the fact that we have the temerity to take these magnificent ‘machines’ for granted even for a moment….

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  15. I see no logical argument for chance in all of that complexity.
    “The human heart is not like a valentine heart. It has a piece of it missing. That piece was ripped from all hearts at Calvary. God saw our human heart so important that He kept that piece for us with Him from all eternity. And we will receive that piece when we return to Him.” – Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
    -Alan

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