02/02/2024
Recipe for Human:
You are not simply a name and a surname, endowed with a social history. Here is your true composition.
You are 71% clear water, 18% carbon, 4% nitrogen, 2% calcium, 2% phosphorus, 1% potassium, 0.5% sulfur, 0.5% sodium, 0.4% chlorine. Plus a good spoonful of various trace elements: magnesium, zinc, manganese, copper, iodine, nickel, bromine, fluorine, silicon. Plus even a small pinch of cobalt, aluminum, molybdenum, vanadium, lead, tin, titanium, boron.
That's the recipe of your existence.
All these materials come from the combustion of stars and can be found elsewhere than in your own body. Your water is similar to that of the most mundane of oceans. Your phosphorus makes you akin to matches. Your chlorine is identical to that used to disinfect swimming pools.
But you are not just that.
You are a chemical cathedral, an astounding construction set with its dosages, its balances, its mechanisms of barely conceivable complexity. For your molecules themselves are made of atoms, particles, quarks, void, all bound by electromagnetic, gravitational, electronic forces, of a subtlety that is beyond you.
Nothing that surrounds you in time and space is useless. You are not useless. Your ephemeral life has meaning. It does not lead you to a dead end. Everything has a meaning.
Act.
Do something, maybe tiny, but for heaven's sake, do something with your life before you die. You were not born for nothing. Discover what you were born for. What is your tiny mission?