We are 70% water. The planet is 70% water.
I think about this a lot 🙂
Do you remember that joke that goes: Us humans are 70% water – so we are basically cucumbers with anxiety. LOL!
When I heard that joke for the first time maybe in the early 2000s, it was funny of course, but also it made me think about a couple of things. The first thing which was quite huge for me, is that humans are perceived to, as a blanket statement, have anxiety. This was interesting to me because in the context of the culture I was brought up in, “having anxiety” was not something that was ever discussed, or even allowed. I come from a stoic people. People that get on with it, without complaining. We suffer in silence. We were so poor, we didn’t even get to have anxiety, har har har 😀 Also the times in which I was a kid, the 1980s and 1990s, were before there was much recognition of mental health difficulties and coping mechanisms. So to learn that it is a rather accepted fact that us humans all have anxiety was quite an eye-opener and made me feel quite seen. Who’d have known a silly joke had such power!
The other things it sparked in me was the acknowledgement of the high percentage of water in our bodies and how it matched the percentage of water composition of our planet. I was aware of the facts, we’d learned this very early on in school, but somehow it didn’t feel like a concrete concept in my head. Maybe it was just because when you’re a kid and you are being taught facts without having much life experience, things don’t feel real. They’re just mental snippets stored in the memory for recall. Until one day: BOOM! a random snippet of information lands in a fertile field of lived experience and suddenly it takes on a new meaning and one experiences the information. You feel it and understand it and live it on a new level.
Just one more aspect that I would like to mention here is the work of the Japanese author Masaru Emoto (1943–2014). You know what I’m talking about – the researcher that “programmed” water with different messages and then photographing the water crystals as he froze the water. Water exposed to messages on the positive and loving side of the scale and beautiful music produced ice crystals that were symmetrical and beautifully intricate; whereas water that was exposed to messages of hate and negativity produced crystals that were deformed and looked like the structural integrity was broken.
Another concept that seems to be gaining traction is that water has memory. Hard-core science has poo-pooed both this idea and the work of Mr Emoto, denouncing it as pseudoscience. But it looks to me that in the past decade or so, more scientists are researching the power of water to store information. (There is this interesting research by S. Tahir et al, if you would like to read more about it. This is the link to the research article published on the University of London website.) So, if we consider that water responds to the energy it is exposed to – whether it be positive and loving or negative and hateful, and that it has the ability to store information, to what extent does it influence the way we feel?
I’ve been, for a while, considering myself as a complex life form 🙂 For the longest time I considered myself to be a human – an autonomous being that makes decisions with my brain and I call the shots with my ego-personality – The End. But then I learned about the huuuuuge colonies of bacteria we have living inside of us – at this point it is estimated that we are roughly 50% – 57% composed of bacteria, with around 38 trillion bacteria cells in our bodies. (You can read about it here on the US Library of Medicine website.) We are very much influenced by the bacterial health in our guts, our general health very much depends on the health of our microbiome. So who is really calling the shots, mmmm? And then when I consider that my body consists of 70% water – water that has memory and is responding to environmental influences… you really have to ask yourself how autonomous you really are…
It would seem to me that we have consciousness, the bacteria that live in us have consciousness and water has consciousness. It would be a bit (ahem!) egotistical to think that is not a confluence of decision-making happening here 😀
In Part 2, let’s look at how water is such a integral part of our language when we talk about ourselves and our mental states, and how we can use that to consciously direct ourselves for a deeper sense of calm and happiness in our lives.
