I am safe, in a cell

Using imagination to explore a biological cell

I am safe, in a cell.

In the world, bright lights and loud noises hurt me.

A cell is soft, and quiet. It feels velvet in texture.

In the world, I’m surrounded by people, whom I often do not understand. I’ll get an interaction wrong, without knowing why. Often, I’m too direct. I need to remember that many questions are not okay to ask. I need to make eye contact, even though it distracts me. I feel contorted. If I feel love in my chest, I might have to shove it through a filter so I make the right expressions in the right way - I can’t express it freely.

In a cell, every atom just wants to be understood. As I hold it in mind, I bring it into being. This is an act of love. The number of molecules is perfect - in a scene, in a cell, you’ll look at 10 or 100 things (enough entities to infer something interesting about what’s going on), which beautifully move by bumping into each other. A child could understand what’s going on, and what will happen next. The molecules are multicolored (that’s a human projection, but we’ll allow it) and friendly - they want to bump into each other, to explore the cell, to find their way outside, to figure out what’s going on. They are placed in the most dazzlingly beautiful landscape known to man. I’ve never understood the appeal of landscapes that stretch as far as the eye can see - vast, beautiful and empty. In a cell, you fill that space up! The cell abhors a vacuum, you just try to have a space between land and sky that isn’t stuffed with bumping, funny, players, trying to figure out what they’re about.

I look at a molecule in the same way that I might look at a puppy and feel something about it, or look at a tree and feel that it’s majestic in some way, or a mountain. To put it differently - I’ve heard people feel things about these objects. Well, goddmanit, why must a water molecule be so exempt from this anthropomorphization? Just because it’s small - that means it wants to be understood more, it’s all there, no tricks you can’t see (at least, in this perspective)! And it’s not fair to say we can’t see it, because we can - a tree or a mountain is just photons hitting your eyeball, molecules (!) bumping through your optic nerve to transmit information, your brain constructing colors we’re not sure even map together perfectly between people. You can do the same with a molecule, and what’s more, when you imagine a molecule it’s an act of creation. You have to really understand what’s going on with that molecule to see it, you created it through your understanding and in the seeing of it. To see it and create it in your mind is, to me, an act of love, of sustained attention, of deep understanding. And yet it still has mystery - the ways the laws that made it interact with other laws, you don’t get all of those at first glance.

And the grandeur and majesty of a cellular landscape. Large, undulating clouds, spitting globules back and forth (the Golgi apparatus). The largest bouncing ball collection on earth, full of molecules of different shapes and sizes, all busy, all pursuing some purpose. Small streams of little ions running through channels to go in and out of the main city (the cytoplasm), streaming through at a rate of 10^7 per second but single file. Motors - motors! - complex, large assemblies more beautiful than anything we could imagine in a utopian city, made of parts we can all see, perfect tiny motors made with the minimal care you might use to construct a minimal, intricate motor of child block parts. And yet, they run us! These tiny motors, millions of them per cell (ATP synthase), and we have trillions of cells, so millions of trillions or - as I like to think in log scale - 18 orders of magnitude. And all of them perfect and beautiful and running in a way that would cause us to stop, struck, and stare if we saw them blown up to run in the middle of a major city. And all of this run by things bumping about. Molecules don’t walk places - they bump randomly! And yet that gets everything done!

The cell is beautiful, and not arbitrary - I can put together pieces of a puzzle, which is complex and tells me about how I - and all life - are made. The cell is quite universal, more complex than any nanofactory one could imagine - like the most beautiful miniature clockwork universe I could imagine - and I can only help it by being myself. It does not ask me to guess how it is feeling - it lets me understand, and connect with it by imagining.

The cell is a safe place, that I wish more people could see. Not in a textbook, but in their bodies. It is not distinct from you - it is you! All of these millions of trillions of molecules rushing about, working perfectly, so that you can pick up your toothbrush. And then look back down from your big human scale and see them! Looking back up at you!

If you could meet me here, and we could play together, laughing in these fields of molecules, staring at the vast infinite beauty that encompasses us, you could see that I - a collection of dancing molecules looking at itself - love you, and that you are so loved, by the parts that make you what you are.