Stuff — sweet and sour.
Nobody can do without it. Nobody survives without it. It is so taken for granted that you only notice it when it's gone. The stuff that rooms are made of. And that turns noticeably sour.
The organism has no trouble reminding itself 24/7: Breathe in. Breathe out. Two whole lung wings and the flowing blood depend on this stuff, after all — stuff that makes many things airier and possible. Anyone who has ever gasped for air — at the wrong moment, in the wrong place — knows how quickly oxygen moves from background to main character. Yes, sometimes this same stuff smells decidedly sour when it’s laced with any number of other foul-smelling substances. What smells doesn’t have to be bad. Worse are those other substances — the ones that rather belong to the secret service — that also drift about in the airy neighbourhood alongside the oxygen, yet are invisible and odourless. Which means the sensor marked “Warning: danger” gets left out of the loop entirely.
And yet oxygen is only the beginning. More and more, I find myself marvelling at how the entire organism goes about its business without a murmur. Always on the ball, always getting on with the work, always doing its job. In the perfectly ordinary case of a healthy body, everything runs just as smoothly and without friction. In younger years, a young body and mind rarely spare much thought for the complexity of the organism. It’s there. Everything runs.
But when age ripens and the body starts to lag behind, a few things shift in a different direction. Out of the proverbial nowhere, previously unbothered body parts become somewhat pain-prone. Arthritis and rheumatism had no roles on the stage of life until now. But wear and tear demands its tribute, and the ageing process has yet to be won by anyone. Officially, at any rate. And yet the many attempts to slow or even reverse ageing are showing great success. For cosmetic surgeons, pill vendors, and those who bottle wisdom in capsules at $29.95, certainly. Did the remedies help? Oh yes — the providers, without a doubt. The refusal to accept ageing has at least created a billion-dollar market.
But back to oxygen and its influence on the body and, often, the mind. At every visit to the doctor, this little clamp gets attached to my finger. Just one finger, and funnily enough rarely the middle one. Then a number appears, wobbling slightly, and settles in somewhere between 97 and 99 per cent for me. That, apparently, is the proportion of oxygen in my blood. Hold on — if nearly a hundred per cent of my blood is filled with oxygen, where does the blood go? A trick question. I caught myself out.
Oxygen takes the liberty of enriching the red blood pigment — called haemoglobin — with its presence at that high percentage. That’s all there is to it. The more saturated, the more oxygen the cells receive. And that is supposed to do the good old and young cells nothing but good.
Who would have thought it: this eternally sourpuss substance, barely to be grasped and never to be seen, carries most of the weight.
If life and the stuff itself can both turn sour sometimes — they are precious all the same
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