Balance

Our world is full of stories and examples of humans doing terrible things to themselves and each other, stories which bombard us in the never ending 24 hour news cycle, which seemingly thrives on such reporting. In this context, it is sometimes easy to forget that humans are actually astonishingly wonderful beings, unimaginably complex and capable of tremendous acts of beauty and meaning. I want always to remember that, and this blog is just a recording of those fleeting moments of realization. G.K. Chesterton wrote that "the world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder;" and I'm trying not to starve anymore.

I don't particularly love public transit, although I appreciate that it's there. I actually don't know too many people who do enjoy it, other than bright-eyed children who have never been on a subway, or maybe those people excited about being able to get hammered and still get home without endangering someone's life. In fact, if you live in a major metropolitan centre like I do, you probably have come to dread the public transit commute, which often feels like being in a mosh pit. A mosh pit taking place inside someone's morning mouth.

But this week's public transit adventure afforded me the opportunity to consider afresh the reality of my bodily existence. For whatever reason, while riding the train this week I became aware of my body in a way that I haven't been in a very, very long time. This awareness was far different from the self-conscious appraisal that most of us probably put ourselves through on a daily basis, wondering how we look, if our outfit flatters us, if our hair is doing what we want it to do. Instead, it was the growing knowledge of how my body is put together.

I typically stand on the train, both because I spend a lot of time at work sitting, and because for me it feels far more awkward to stand and offer my seat to someone else than simply not take it in the first place. So I was standing, and our train started to travel over a particularly uneven section of track, which rocked the train back and forth and up and down. As the carriage bobbed and weaved I started to pay attention to my body's response to this movement, how my body would automatically adjust to even the slightest movement of the train, tightening and loosening muscles, making sure I stayed upright.

Have you ever considered how and why we keep standing? Have you ever thought about the complex process(es) that our body goes through to make sure that these kinds of events don't send us into an embarrassing sprawl? I'm not a doctor or scientist, but here is what I learned about what my body was doing to make sure I stayed standing, looking awkwardly straight ahead and not making eye contact with anyone, rather than laid out on the floor (and having everyone try to avoid looking at me).

While standing there, the muscles and joints in my feet, ankles, and legs were registering the changes in the position of the floor of the train (as it raised, lowered, and moved side to side with the movement of the tracks), and the hand that was holding a pole also registered its movement (as the movement of the train caused the pole to move alternately closer, then further away, from my body). At the same time, my vestibular apparatus was figuring out my motion, equilibrium, and spatial orientation. As I turned my head to look down the length of the train, three semi-circular canals filled with sensory hair cells registered the movement of fluid in these canals as my head moved (each canal registers a different type of movement). My saccule, another semi-circular canal, registered that my head was moving up and down (along with the rest of my body), even though I myself wasn't in motion.

All of this information was sent to my brain stem, which sorted it all out, integrating it with already gathered information from my cerebellum (the coordination centre of my brain, which told me that when a train rocks back I need to shift my weight forward) and the cortex (the part that thinks and remembers, which told me that when the train stops I will be thrown the opposite direction to the direction I was moving, as I had experienced numerous times before). I wasn't drunk, and none of these systems had been previously damaged, so I stayed standing. Which is great, because it is quite embarrassing to fall over on the train, especially if you are a man and you fall into a woman and you wonder if in the back of her mind she is wondering if you did it on purpose so you could cop a feel (which, I should point out, I have never, ever done).

What a complex, intricate, and finely-crafted body we inhabit. It's something I take for granted every day, and yet every movement can seem a tiny miracle, especially when one considers that this is only a fraction of the information being gathered, processed, and acted on at any given time. It's mind-boggling. I know that we have arrived at this point, this intimate knowledge of our own body, because we are standing on the shoulders of giants, but perhaps we should take a minute to marvel at the fact that we are standing at all.