I don’t like gore and guts. I used to pass out when I got blood drawn. My shoulders scrunch to my ears and I physically shudder when people get descriptive about deep cuts, torn or lost fingernails, eyeball injuries. I don’t want to see broken bones sticking out of skin or peer into an incision during surgery. I’d never survive a cadaver dissection for anatomy or med school. I’d barf or pass out or both.

At the same time, I can’t believe we’re all walking around in these bodies that breathe, pump blood, have 200+ bones that work perfectly together to hold us up and hang all our muscles and organs and guts on, 600+ muscles to move us around, have eyes, skin, ears, noses, and tongues that send signals to our brain so we can see, feel, hear, smell, and taste our world. Our bodies create their own electricity to make our hearts beat and our muscles contract and our nerves communicate. We have hands that can grasp. We have lungs to breathe and send oxygen throughout our bodies, and this unbelievable digestive system that processes everything we eat and drink to retain and transport the necessary nourishment for this wild body that contains us, that carries us, that is our vehicle for existence.

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to Mary Roach talk about her book Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy on a podcast. She talked about watching heart surgery. She said it was astonishing to see the heart in action. How small and powerful it is. How strong. And unexpectedly, how much it moves and jumps around in there. It’s not just in our chests, quietly and gently pumping while it reads the Sunday paper. It jitters and pumps and jerks over 100,000 beats per day, ceaselessly, over days, weeks, months, years, decades, never sleeping. How could it ever last as long as it does? It is humbling. Thank you, my heart.

She also talked about musculature, and how it’s not all the shaped the same. She talked about this in the context of 3-D printing. Some muscle is helix shaped, like the heart, because it needs to twist for pumping. Some muscle, like the hamstring, is long and arranged in parallel bundles. Some muscle, like the shoulder, is fan-shaped to enable range of motion.

And I thought, it is a miracle that we exist. That all these millions of pieces developed over time to create this perfect design that allows me to sit here and drink coffee with a purring cat on my lap while I type up a blog post. To go for a walk later. To taste chocolate. To plant mums and read books and love my husband and children. Bones, muscle, electricity, chemistry, organs, brain, senses. It’s all so amazing to me.

And if that weren’t enough, we go beyond these bodies to just exist and survive in the elements. We talk, we commune, we share ideas. We build, we explore, we create technologies. We write, we play music. We paint and sculpt and film and photograph and make beautiful art. We feel emotions. We create. We love.