Daily Death and Rebirth

A brain is a very interesting fluid and static structure. It is not a computer. It changes on a constant basis. But it's not a software change. There is a simultaneous software and hardware change. It changes chemically and structurally on the basis of our experiences. That's what makes it so fascinating.
When we learn something, we know it. We never knew it before. It may be something that we remember forever. That means our brain has changed forever. We don't have the same brain that we had before that moment. This happens over and over again throughout the day. At the end of the day, we have a very different brain than we had at the beginning of the day. This may be subtle. Even if it is, after a year or a decade the changes are profound. So mentally we have a physically and chemically different brain than we once had.
Our brain isn't the only thing that is changing. If we breath in some of the oxygen that goes into our lungs is absorbed. It is attached to our blood. It then is brought into some tissue - perhaps a liver or a muscle. Here, the oxygen is deposited and may become a part of that cell. When we exhale, carbon dioxide is released. Some of that carbon used to be a part of a cell in our body. The urine and the feces also eliminate compounds that were at one time integral pieces of our body. They made up a part of a cell's membrane or other organelle. So if we could monitor the molecules in our body, we would notice that each day (actually each breath) they were changing. Although you may perceive that your body is the same body that you once had, it isn't. It would be like a car that we took every single piece off of and replaced. It's not really the same car anymore.
We are attached to the notion that we are the same person we've always been. But this isn't real. We are constantly different. The one that we were yesterday is dead. Today we are someone else. We are reborn every morning. We are a new person.
Sometimes, this can be very dramatic. In a moment, when we have a stroke, we are very profoundly different. We have completely died. A new person is born. This is very hard for our loved ones. They are attached to thinking that we are (or should be) the person that we were yesterday.
It's a good idea to meet everyone that we know as a new person every day. We tend to treat people the way we think they are, which is actually the way that they were before. But they've changed now. So we need to treat them differently. It's very bothersome this way. That's because we don't know anyone since they're different this minute than they were last minute.
In medicine, this is critical. Every time a patient comes in, they may have changed their diagnosis. People want to know, based on their disease, what their future holds. But I tell them that any statement that I make regarding their health is only valid until the time they walk out of the office. Bodies and health change very quickly, without warning.
People say to me that they had a stress test and everything was fine. Therefore, they shouldn't have had a heart attack one week later. But it's not like that. That heart attack can come suddenly without warning. We might not be able to see it coming.
When there is a new illness in our family we have to confront this reality. We have to look very deeply at our loved one. We have to meet them for the first time and acknowledge that the person we knew yesterday is gone. And we have to realize that we are also a new person. We have to start all over again. In a way, this is painful. Everything that we've done, that we've created and worked for is gone. But in another way it is also pretty exciting. People get bored with relationships. That's because they fail to see that every relationship is reborn every moment and every day.