Meditation 1: "Everything That Rises Must Also Converge"

Spinal nerve, with potential moving down the ventral root, up the dorsal root.

The street I cross twice daily, a fairly busy highway

Medicine can really make you believe in God. I'm not talking about the day-to-day interactions with patients, the miracle of someone pulling through surgery, the beauty of a baby being pushed out of the womb as nature intends. I'm talking about anatomy: bones, muscles, nerves, blood--and the fact that all of these come together to make a functioning human being who feels and moves.

For some time--about two years--I have been almost-obsessed with the work of Lawrence Weschler, an art critic who has compiled a list of convergences: pieces of art that depict, in different ways, the same sort of concept, or natural occurences that imitate art [that is imitating life, and so on].

This morning's anatomy lesson was concerned with some basic lecturing on the nervous system. The peripheral nervous system contains two types of nerves: afferent and efferent. Efferent nerves move out of the central nervous system via the ventral root; it is these nerves that allow us to move our muscles. Afferent nerves move into the central nervous system via the dorsal root; these nerves let us feel sensation. They converge to form spinal nerves, and they often work together. Feelings get sent to the brain, which sends out signals that let us move accordingly. Sometimes, our movements send us careening into sharp edges of tables or to touch the faces of loved ones: our feelings respond to these movements, and we then move again in response to this system. Back and forth, forth and back we go, a series of chain reactions that starts as soon as the nervous system develops and continues until we die.

As a medical student, I spend much of my time absorbed in the particulars of human existence. Not existence like the state of humanity, not art nor beauty nor literature [the things that make life worth living], but the molecular and gross structures that comprise our individual physical existences. On my way home, I palpate my own muscles, and move my arms--amazed that my brain is sending impulses that allow me to swing my arms, move my fingers to brush my hair out of my eyes, move my face to smile at my "street people," the familiar faces I encounter each day. My walks back and forth to the college make a transition time where I go macro to micro, then eventually turn around and go micro to macro again. Back and forth, forth and back I go, a series of chain reactions.

Tonight, on my way home, I stood in the median on the Crosstown while cars moved on either side of me. Passing each other in their own respective lives, their individual tasks, I could not help but think of my very nerves, passing each other in their own individual tasks. It occurred to me that each human is a singular nerve potential, going back and forth in their lives, inciting others to motion and to feeling.

Today we were urged to remember, above all things, that we are part of humanity. Tonight, standing in the median of the Crosstown, with the nerves of the city running around me, I felt perfectly small, and I realized that I--perhaps more than some others--will never be able to forget.