The Greatest Blessing of Life

At designated times of the year like Easter, Passover and other holidays, we are often asked to count our blessings. Maybe you’ve been reminded of this somewhat hypothetical activity when confronted with someone else’s problems. “There but for the Grace of God go I” seemed an archaic rumination until I had emergency ulcer surgery in 1991—feeling sorry for myself until I realized that my room at St. Claire’s Hospital was on a ward of people with terminal illnesses. All my intravenous lines, electrodes, and tubes seemingly vanished when I pondered the depth of those patients’ despair and suffering. It was an epiphany of sorts, but one arrived at through transformation of selfishness into empathy for others less fortunate.

Are you conscious of how seamlessly the human body works? Think about the organs over which you have no control: your spleen, ureters, ciliary muscles, alveoli, pons, and portal triad (among dozens of other body parts) are actively engaged in highly specific tasks beyond the scope of human understanding, let alone noticeable feelings. Put another way, the parts of your body that you actually notice—your brain (via self-talk and voluntary actions)…your muscles (via your conscious movements)…your digestive tract (via hunger and subsequent satiation)—are a tiny component of the entire machine. The part of you that’s unique (your thoughts, your memories, your knowledge base, your appearance) is really very small when compared with the dazzling molecular structure, biochemical interrelationships, and mechanical intricacies of the musculoskeletal infrastructure. Shakespeare called the human body “the beauty of the Earth, the paragon of animals.”

Yet there is something even more beautiful than the human body, and that is the mysterious set of emotions that draws people together. While we share these unknowable forces with every member of the animal kingdom, we humans seem to do it more poetically. From earliest childhood when we are taught social behavior, we can develop a need to share, a special pleasure in the attention and affection of others, and perhaps even an inner calm and contentment when we find ourselves in intimate relationships.

Like optimal health, personal contentment is an evanescent pleasure, one subject to the whims of fortune, the inexorable forces of nature, and the ultimate fragility of the human body. The people we are closest to will eventually vanish from our lives, even under the best circumstances. The loss will be magnified exponentially the closer and more intense the relationship was. That cannot dissuade us from trying to reach out to others, hoping by some strange twist of fate, or perhaps just good luck, or even the kind intervention of a friend, to find someone who can give a meaning to life that eludes all of medical science.

The greatest blessing of life is the one that transcends the ravages of time, aging, disease, despair, loneliness, and fear. It is the force that ennobles us, makes us capable of being more than ourselves, more than complex biochemical machines, more than a collection of organ systems. Like the human body, it is magical, powerful, uncontrollable, and all-enveloping. It is ample reason for life itself. It is love.