Colonoscopies....yum!

In my line of work, I see lots of people’s insides via a few sheets of color photos. Anything that moves fluids from one place to another and is below the layers of epidermis and viscera, I’ve seen it. One of the parts of one’s insides I see much of every day is the lower digestive tract. Specifically, the large intestine and colon - The Colonoscopy....ick, right? Why is he wasting a blog on talking about people’s pooper scoopers?

I have seen literally thousands of these procedures. Granted, I don’t get to see the procedure itself, but the exploratory results of one. They made me very uncomfortable and queasy at first, I expected the paper with the pictures to actually smell acrid and offensive. But alas, it was just paper. (I apologize for the vulagarity of this...there is a point. Bear with me.)

And in my non-professional, uneducated opinion, I have learned one immutable truth from this:

We are all the same on the inside!

I have heard people much older and wiser than myself say this very thing. I was thinking about the truth in this statement though. What makes us think that we are so special? We all bleed the same, break the same and expire with time.

So that got me thinking about how humans pang for individuality. As Westerners, we seem to whine about it. Like it’s our birthright or something. I think it’s simply from boredom that we are creating and re-creating things. I’m not saying that creating is bad, but it’s the mentality that underlies the ’creation’ that is telling.

A story I heard on the radio yesterday talked about how teenagers today are starting to wear bandanas. One of the ladies that called in to the show, who was an administrator at the middle school she worked at, said to the kid "I wore those things when I was your age, and they need to stay in that time period".

Solomon the writer of Ecclesiastes in verse 1:9 says "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Which got me thinking about the story of the teenager wearing the bandana. Why did he wear the bandana thinking it was "starting a new thing"?

If this is something that has been done before, why is labeling it "new". This may be the ignorance of a teenager (many of whom believe they are the best thing since they put peanut butter and jelly in the same jar).

Someone at 80 is typically more advanced in common knowledge about the world, than someone who is 40, than someone who is 25, than someone who is 16. We discover some new epiphany about the world that someone else before us has discovered, and someone before them did. In my illustration, it is the new discovery of something as trivial as bandanas. It’s them trying out their world.

But it is when we are revealed that the ’new thing’ is nothing special that we are then able to appreciate it for what it is. All like babies we are, daily learning something new about our world.

Here’s to today.