Gratitude — Parent of All Virtues

Now imagine your normal health has been restored. Or imagine you have been given unlimited new resources to start your life all over. Wouldn’t you be incredibly grateful for such gifts?

In reality, similar miracles happen nonstop right inside you. It is taking place in all 50 trillion cells in your body, every moment that you are alive. And, for the moment, all you need to do is to take a breath.

You are living proof of this reality.

When good things keep happening all the time, we tend to stop experiencing the joy and gratitude. Instead, we get distracted, stressed out, and even overwhelmed by other things that are not going our way.

Bad things that keep happening in real life enable us to recognize the good. And as long as we are still here, by definition, the good is still prevailing over the bad, if only by a thin margin.

We are going to highlight this positive margin. We shouldn’t take it for granted anymore, especially when life is tough like now. From this winning margin we can rise and thrive.

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues,
but the parent of all the others.”

—Marcus Cicero

Thank Your Body

Have you ever tried to organize a project or a gathering for, say, 50 people? Can you imagine doing that with 50 trillion people?

Originating from a single cell, about 50 trillion cells in your body diversify to function differently yet collectively in unison and simultaneously for one purpose: your life and optimal wellbeing.

There are more cells in your body than stars in the Milky Way

Millions of complicated chemical reactions within every cell, each with special purposes, all run together without blowing anything up.

We cannot fathom the kind of intelligence and competence required to manage this degree of complexity with near perfection every second that you are alive.

Even quantum computing cannot approach it. As my own body’s sole supervisor, I am utterly unqualified and mostly AWOL.

How often are you burdened by your body’s nonstop inner workings? Aren’t you grateful it runs so well, so much of the time on autopilot?

Busy Body

A popular exercise to practice gratitude is to count at least one blessing every day. It gets hard after a couple of weeks. Here are a few tips you can always use. You have trillions of them available all the time.

Let’s scan the surfaces of just a few things our body does.

Consider walking. The biomechanics alone are so sophisticated that no computer animation or robotics can mimic a person’s stride. And each person has a signature walk so unique that new software can use it for a positive ID of that person.

A stubbed toe lets you know how good it is to just stand still without pain. Running or dancing takes it to yet another level.

Our opposable thumb allows us to make an OK sign, which no other animals can do. We can also engineer countless other body movements—routine, goofy, athletic, and artistic.

Even if you cannot walk, your body still engage in lots of facial and body movements by choreographing your roughly 200 bones, 300 joints, 600 muscles, and 1,200 tendons.

Beyond that, we glide on water, fly through air en mass, and venture into outer space using various human extensions.

If you do your recommended steps every day, wouldn’t you use some of the 10,000 opportunities to be grateful for that miracle feat?

“I felt sorry for myself for losing my shoes
until I saw someone who lost his feet.
I took his shoes but was I grateful!”

—a wise old fool

In the body, we have a sort of recycling system called Metabolism. Half of its job is making good, the other half breaking bad.

Plants, like apples, feed on sunlight. If you eat an apple now, your body Metabolism will convert it into you in a few hours. A while later, the unused parts go back into the earth to grow other lifeforms.

Animals and plants recycle one another. With metabolism, basically our bodies and all lifeforms come from air, water, sunlight, and dirt. What a low-budget feat!

Within one year, 99% of our body parts get broken down, even our teeth and bones. The body also keeps replenishing it with new and vital components. The balance must be perfect, though.

In a child, making must outpace breaking, or the kid won’t grow. In an adult, if making outpaces breaking by just a little, cells get fatter over time, and the body gets obese. And if the number of any particular cell type keeps going up unchecked, the result is cancer.

Metabolism also works in reverse. If you shrink down your fattened cells by eating less or moving more, evenby a little bit, over time, they function better, and the body gets slimmer and healthier. Cancer risk also drops.

This two-way turnover effect of metabolism permits your body to renew itself constantly. How you want the next new version of your body to turn out is up to you at this and any moment.

All you need to do is choose some sensible lifestyle routines, and your body metabolism will do the rest. We get so much for what little we have to do. And new beginnings are unlimited and always available. How can we be ungrateful?

One design of our private utility system is a puzzle for many comedians. Why are our body waste disposal outlets located so close to our major recreational areas?

This other design, though, is approved by science. Water, roughage, and exercise are perfect for unclogging our 30-foot long digestive tract and for irrigating our entire body playground.

60,000 miles end-to-end, our circulatory plumbing system deploys 25 trillion blood cells from their bone marrow depots to deliver all necessary life support to every part of the body.

With 5 million cells packed in every drop of blood, these “UPS-units” work fast and furious—20 seconds per round trip, covering 12,000 miles a day—equal to halfway around the world, retiring only after making a quarter of a million journeys in 4 months, and for no bonus mileage points.

Their driver is the heart—a fist-sized muscle that pumps 100,000 times a day 24/7/366, 3 billion times a lifetime. How the heart’s metronome keeps its optimal timing remains a mystery to my fellow cardiologists.

Don’t we all have a strong feeling that our heart is more than just a sub-pump? That fills another library of miracles.

Our ventilatory system, breathing, is yet another marvel covered in my last posting.

We won’t even touch on the body’s electrical network of 100 billion neurons that operate our brain and nervous system, and many other systems. This intricate electrical grid is easy to blow out unless you safeguard your stress fuses.

For now, we will leave off the mind-boggling complexities of energy modulation, material supply, temperature control, and immune defense, to name a few.

Next time you have to deal with a contractor for just a small job, you will be very grateful for all your automated internal utilities.

Let’s talk about genes and jeans.

Genetics account for our obesity epidemic only to a small extent and not in the way many people think. The human race did not go through a massive genetic mutation to have gained the 20-30% excess body weight collectively in the past decades.

We have changed our lifestyle. The DNA we have inherited from the ancient past was great for hunters and gatherers. It is not ideal for our way of life today.

Thankfully, relatively small changes in our mindset and lifestlye can correct for that. Metabolism is reversible. Mind over matter! Nurture over nature.

In a recent study, Stanford researchers intentionally misinformed participants (temporarily) about their genetic testing results before starting a weight loss program. What affected the outcome most was not the participants’ actual DNA. The decisive influence was what their minds had been misled to believe.

We can also willfully regulate our genetics by ordinary measures. Epigenetics are “switches” on top of our DNA genes that can be flipped on or off by external levers. These levers include various chemical conditions, microbial balance, and corrosive effects of inflammation—all under our control.

Our habitual behaviors have veto power over our inherited DNA. We cannot rewrite our genes, but we can change just a few routines so that we can fit into smaller jeans if we want.

We are not fixed to be what we are by our ancestral makeup. We are free to be what we want to be by ordinary means. It all begins with a little mindset reset. And every moment can be a new beginning.

“As we express our gratitude,
we must never forget that the highest appreciation
is not to utter words, but to live by them.”

—John F. Kennedy

Do You Mind? Thanks!

All that is an overly simplified, ultra-superficial representation of a tiny fraction of all the miracles that take place unceasingly in the body.

In this lockdown, we are often stuck at home with all kinds of problems to face. Now is the time to take a few moments every day to be grateful for this intelligence and grace that is always here right inside of our own body.

If we work against it, how can we expect it to run well? If we recognize it and appreciate it with gratitude, it may even overflow into our outward daily undertakings. It often does.

If we can tap into a mere fraction of this extraordinary excellence from time to time, imagine what we can accomplish as ordinary beings. That would be both the expression and the materialization of our gratitude.

With gratitude, a natural tendency is to find ways to give back or pay forward. What a privileged position that is!

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it
is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”

— William Arthur Ward

Heal the past and bring a better future with the present of gratitude. What that takes is already in you.

WRITTEN BY

Tak C. Poon, MD, PharmD, ABHIM, FACC, Preventive Cardiologist, now developer of a non-profit wellness blog and a habit-forming lifestyle app at www.metacardio.org, and confessor of lessons I have learned in life.

Tak PoonFebruary 12, 2021An ordinary reminder of the extraordinary excellence already in youComment