I Saw Your Message that You Wrote in the Sand

You might not like that I'm going in these directions.

I've been thinking about the big questions. The biggest ones, lately. Some of them are tricky subjects - like death and love.

As a rider to my thought yesterday: no one really knows why we die. There are a ton of theories, scientific ones that is, dealing with cell death, the loss of telomeres or chromosome caps, etc. More interesting though, is the ecological phenomenon of heart beats. I've been joking for years that everyone gets an allotted amount of heartbeats per lifetime to show that working out - a process that speeds up the heart rate - will actually kill you faster since you'll use up those beats faster. It's a good joke that keeps me on the couch, and it's not completely untrue. The part about working out killing you is, but the standard amount of heartbeats isn't.

It seems that all animals get approximately the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime - something just over 100 million. Small animals' heart beat like crazy. Gigantic animals - like elephants - have much slower heart rates. Thus, it takes about 2 years for a mice to use its allotted beats and takes a whale something like 80. There's no proof of cause-and-effect here, but there is proof of a correlation. Humans, even though we're smaller than elephants, get to live longer because (no one really knows) we are so evolutionarily awesome. We're the most advanced animal, we create medicines, we don't have any really predators, etc.

I've been thinking a lot about love lately as well. From a chemical standpoint, love is an addiction to another person (that doesn't seem too far off from other definitions of love, either). When we meet a person that we connect with on that level, the brain makes a note of it and releases awesome amounts of drugs into our system - dopamine, serotonin, etc. that increase the activity in our brain's pleasure-center (that's what it's really called) and raise our heart rate (which may or may not be killing us faster). It's what makes our heart beat flutter (thanks John) when she calls or he smiles or she winks or he holds your hand or she wears cute shorts or he opens the door for you.

The chemicals make you irritable, excited, lose your appetite, lose sleep, crave the person's attention. When we see the person again, we get that rush of chemicals again, and we get dependent.

All this to say - in my usual roundabout way of getting to things - that scientifically showing the backdrop of death and love does nothing to take away from the romanticism of either. Science is interested in the "how", not the "why" so the big questions still remain. Where do we go when we die? What happens to us? Why do we fall in love with whom we fall in love with? How we get them to love us? Even if we can explain what's going on with us physically, how does that factor into the creation behind the action? To the plan behind it?

Some of you may notice that my facebook profile under religious views reads: Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's a bit of a joke, but it actually applies to two concepts here. One, death is the second law of thermodynamics. Heat and energy cannot travel from a colder to a warmer body. That's why the ice melts in your warm drink. Nature is irreversible. Once a cell begins dying, or a person, they will reach that goal. And we start that process from minute one.

But I also see it as a way to deal with other people - thus, why it's my religious view - heat cannot travel from a colder body to a warmer body. I think it's important to always strive to be that warmer body to pass energy onto others. Energy and heat are just scientific ways of saying love, friendship, kindness, warmth. You cannot emit love if you are not imbued with love; you can't energize others if you aren't energized yourself; you cannot give kindness without having it to give. Where you get your energy from, your love from, your sense of kindness is one of the bigger questions - does it come from God? surroundings? nature? DNA? but I think it's important to be aware of that need.

And maybe sometimes it's alright to be the one that takes some energy and warmth away from someone else. We can't, after all, always be the shining light in the room.