The Heart Cell Meets the Stem Cell

 The heart cell, a highly specialized and hard-working cell, is hard at work keeping the body's blood pumping. It gets no breaks, it has no incentive, it does what it does because the system prepared it to do so. One day at work, some damage is done to the heart, and the body's natural defense system deploys, sending stem cells to the site. The stem cells are specialized and turned into heart cells. They choose a path, unchangeable from what they were before, and unable to be anything different in the future. Their fate has been sealed. Do you think that the heart cell looks upon this stem cell with sadness? A future doomed to work for a system that it will never understand, keeping alive a being that it can never meet, and doing work it will never see the benefit of.

Sometimes, I feel like the heart cell. I look upon some of my friends who never went to college; they either went straight to work or decided to take life into their own hands and carve their own path. The modern world seems to have a path cut out for us, a way that we live that will support this giant system of which we will never know, but we get glimpses of. We work and pay taxes that support wars that we do not want to be a part of. We are indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands just by working to support our nation. Like a cell of the heart, fueling this unending torment that is the aimless, perverted desire of the system we embody. But it is not over.

We are not heart cells. We will never be that specialized, changing form and shape to more efficiently complete a task that we do not, ourselves, align with. We are stem cells, able to change our life's direction at any moment, change our support, our energy into something that matters. When I decided on my major, I debated what I wanted to do with my life. I saw what others were doing, building businesses, buildings, systems. They all made money and didn't really make a life-or-death difference. The world would still run without Apple. So, in an attempt to feel like I was important, I realized what the world cannot run without: life. I studied life sciences, thinking that, as the baseline of every other industry, there would be lots of demand, especially since we are struggling environmentally. But no, as a nation, we do not care about the land which we live on, nor the life we share it with. I am a stem cell in the body of a man who does not take care of his own body.

A stem cell does not stand a chance against a human, but many do. If we can collectively understand that the future of the world is up to us, maybe we would live our lives differently.