My 11 year old grandson and I recently went to the Natural History museum in Balboa Park (San Diego) and saw the most wondrous exhibit - Body Worlds (www.sdnhm.org).  It's an original exhibition of real human bodies that have been 'plasticized' so they remain intact.  All the skin is removed so you can see the muscles, bones, tendons and the organs.  Some are dissected and some are posed into everyday activities - ballet, skateboarding, the baseball player - so you can see how the body accommodates those strenuous activities.

 

It's a truly amazing spectacle and at first I felt like Alice in Wonderland after she went through the Looking Glass: a voyeur in a very strange land.  Most of us know what our insides look like, more or less, but there was something unnerving and yet magical in seeing so many bodies dissected and displayed in one location.  

 

At first I found myself wondering about these people's lives - what they did for a living, did they have a happy life, were they young or old when they passed away and marveling at how generous it was to donate their remains for such a unique scientific project.

 

Then, as we walked through the exhibit, and as we began to fully appreciate the sheer miracle of how our body parts work together, it occurred to me: the media has us so focused on our outward appearance, we often forget that it's what we carry internally that forms the foundation of our well-being and without that solid foundation, nothing we do topically or surgically to our skin or face matters nearly as much as the care we give to our insides. 

 

 

We are all guilty of being caught up in the superficiality of appearance and have at least some dependence on visual chemistry.  But what was so obvious in this exhibit is that who we truly are, our personalities and our quirkiness and all the traits that make us individual is not, in any way, tied to our bodies. 

 

No matter what your religious or spiritual beliefs (and with immense respect to all of them), the essence of who we are lies not in our physical being but somewhere else.

 

None of the bodies on exhibit could speak or laugh or write a love letter or bake cookies.  They are just the empty vessel that used to house a living person.  It matters not what someone initially looks like; for how many times have you met someone you at first found unattractive, only to befriend them and eventually see them for who they really are and then found them beautiful?

 

So the next time you gaze critically into your own looking glass, remember to care for your internal self, find your own balance, and love yourself for the individual you are.  And if you get a chance to visit the Body Worlds exhibit, remember, as my grandson says, it is 'gross' - the highest compliment an 11 year old bestows.

 

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