Writing

I have no control over what my body does.

My eyes blink. My heart beats. My blood flows. And my lungs inhale and exhale.

My stomach churns the remnants of the ham sandwich and potato chips I had for lunch, before secreting them into my small intestine, which muscles these goods along its 22-foot tract lined with nutrient-extracting villi.

My body sleeps (though usually not long enough): when this happens, my muscles relax; my breathing slows and my blood pressure and body temperature drop; my adrenal glands on my kidneys release cortisol, which regulates my body’s metabolism and response to stress; and my brain’s pituitary gland releases a hormone that encourages muscle and bone tissue growth. The net result of these and many other sleepy time processes is that my body repairs itself and reenergizes and resets. Meanwhile, when I first doze off, my brain waves slow down, but eventually they’ll work up impulses that translate into sensations and perceived images – even storylines, dreams. When I wake, this same brain toys with unconscious desires, fantasies, and fears that’ll likely drive my actions more than I care to admit and more than I’ll ever really know.

These amazing electrical, chemical, and mechanical processes happen without my command. I don’t give them permission to proceed. In fact, I am unable to stop them. And, unbeknownst to my conscious, analytical mind, this body of mine performs many, many more functions of its own volition than those that I’ve listed here.

This even happens on the cellular level — skin cells, nerve cells, hair cells, bone cells, marrow cells, blood cells (red and white), and so many other cells that make up my organs and fluids, hormones and acids: they reproduce incessantly, also without my command. Over and over and over and over again, my cells reproduce (well, except for brain neurons and my eyeballs’ lenses and a portion of my heart; apparently, those types of cells don’t reproduce, and it’s use ‘em or lose ‘em). An inventory of about 200 different types of cells comprise this lovely bod of mine, totaling about a hundred million million (100,000,000,000,000) cells (give or take a few million). Then, without direction from my conscious mind, they work together to accomplish things.

These cells do die. In fact, I’m afraid to do the math on just how many of those hundred million million cells are, on average, expiring and shedding each and every minute – including this very minute, as I write these words. Still, while the long-term prognosis is that this amazing bod of mine is slowly passing away, for now it’s still regenerating new cells, some at a relatively quick clip: the lining in my stomach replaces itself every few days, and I lose my outer layer of skin every few weeks. Again, this all happens without me lifting a finger.

So when I’m looking at myself in the bathroom mirror each morning, shirtless, and flexing those muscle and tendon cells that comprise my biceps, my conscious mind is thinking: Damn, boyyyy … You are one impressive specimen!

In some moments, my cerebrum, the largest part of my brain, can wrest the helm controlling a few of these primal processes away from my brain stem, that neurological gatekeeper that connects my bigger brain to my spinal cord and, from there, the rest of my body. I can control the rate of my breathing and heart beating for some moments – by holding my breath or taking deep, slow breaths, or meditating, or forest bathing (it’s a thing, look it up; it doesn’t involve water). Or else I can go for a jog and increase the rate of my breathing and heart beating. Also, I can “just hold it till the next rest stop,” or else refuse to funnel food to those intestines in the first place. I might compete in staring contests or stay up past my bedtime - choosing to neither blink nor sleep. While I am not one of them, lucid dreamers can, purportedly, control the plotlines of their nighttime peregrinations. Moreover, I do always have the ill-advised option of offing myself and ending altogether the heartbeats and brain activity and cell reproduction, though I’m not certain this nuclear option constitutes “control,” per se. These are all ways in which I do have some control over what my body does.

Still, eventually and inevitably my brain stem tamps down any of my mutinying impulses and reclaims control of the ship, forces my body to breath, pee, digest, blink, and sleep. In those moments, I again lose control and the bigger part of my brain is rendered helpless. In fact, during the many, many years since that cold but wondrous January morning when I came into this world as a 9-pound, 4-ounce baby, the longest I’ve been able to go without inhaling air is surely no more than about one minute (if that); all told, if my calculations are correct, I’ve taken about 357,700,000 breaths (give or take a few million), the vast majority of them involuntarily. As for holding it till the next rest stop, I can certainly do better than a minute, but some days just barely. And I lose most staring contests.

Of course, my lack of control over some aspects of this amazing bod of mine differs significantly from those moments in which I “lose control,” and I finish off the last few lovely, chewy brownie squares last seen in a pan on the kitchen counter, just before bedtime: “It’s not my fault! I couldn’t control myself!” I might protest the next morning, to yowling, scowling, hands-on-hips family members who aren’t buying it … No, the important, involuntary work of my body doesn’t include moving muscles and joints in my arms and fingers to relocate those chocolatey sweets from that pan and into my (involuntarily) salivating mouth or chewing with jaw muscles and bones doing their part to placate a hunger that I may well have convinced myself has become “uncontrollable.”

Neither would these uncontrollable body machinations have included contending (lightheartedly, mind you) with one’s college girlfriend that a desire to make-out regularly was simply a matter of one’s “instinct” that should, as a matter of evolutionary progress and shared best interests, be acted upon, the more regularly the better … No, one’s college girlfriend, having had a modicum of smarts and self-respect, would instead have noted that such a drive and claim could more appropriately be attributed to animals of a lesser order – say, rabbits or donkeys, maybe baboons or, better yet, slugs – rather than a boyfriend who’s purportedly a big-brained mammal of a higher order, able to think abstractly about ethics, emotions, and consequences resulting from one’s decision making, present evidence notwithstanding.

Each of these examples would, naturally, represent a lack of self-control, rather than an absolute inability to control one’s self.

So, the point stands: primal parts of my brain set into motion work that my body completes regardless of what the rest of my mind and body might otherwise suggest (and regardless of my personal will, really, which is worth more exploration, but beyond the purview of this essay) . Unless tragedy suddenly strikes, my heart will continue to beat today, no matter how many times I exclaim (or sing along with the British rock star Sting): “Be still, my beating heart ...”

There are social elements to this loss of control: I am unable to not think the word “hair” when I hear a Rod Stewart or Bon Jovi song. I most certainly have no control over such triggered associations. If you know anything about these artists, you know why – and your mind’s eye has also now been coopted by images of those crooning rockers and their long locks.

This big-hair mind meld is the result of something that Ralph Waldo Emerson, well before the advent of rock and roll, called the “universal mind.” This is the cumulative body of thought and expression that has, over millennia, been built up and handed down, wherein “the whole of history is in one man.” We have no understanding of anything without reference to what has come before. No thoughts or actions that are purely our own. “Who has access to this universal mind,” Emerson writes, “is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent … Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.”

So my thoughts and actions are also informed (predetermined, on some level?) by culture, handed down from one generation to the next. My thoughts and actions are formed, informed, and guided by all that has come before me. There’s nothing I can know or do that is not, in some way, driven by precedent set by other humans. Of course, at the conscious level my mind retains just a small portion of our shared history, and thoughts and actions emanating from this mind are culturally bound. Today, this universal mind is rapidly being translated into digital code, stored in a cloud seemingly more accessible than our own minds. Google’s power of recall is much, much better than mine, and all that digital code is surely driving an awful lot of my thoughts and actions - as I scroll and post and browse...

All told and in the end, myriad involuntary, uncontrollable events emanate from this highly evolved brain and body of mine that I did not create, cannot heal, cannot recreate, and, for the most part, cannot govern. And this is a collective experience. Every day, billions of out-of-control bodies are encountering other out-of-control bodies.

Still, even with such limited command over these bodies and minds, we put an awful lot of faith in them. Outrageously, I seem to believe that my grey brain matter accurately interprets the electrical pulses that miles and miles of whitish bundles of nerves have so skillfully presented to it. Even more outrageously, I tend to believe that my brain’s powers of discernment prove more accurate than the brains of people around me – in everything from religion, ethics, and politics to optimal strategies for loading the dishwasher. Meanwhile, the billions of other 3-pound brains wandering the earth also seem to have incredible faith in the involuntary behavior of their bodies, and they generally believe their perceptions and reliability exceed my own.

Though I have so little control over this amazing body of mine, and I don’t fully know how all these signals running through my neurons and synapses work in the first place (none of us do), I’m convinced that my views on things are pretty much on target … even as these views contradict — or at least differ from — the perceptions of billions of other people. Meanwhile, all those bodies and brains trust their own perceptions and reliability over mine.

And so do you.

Though you have no control over what your body does.