String by String

I was reading up this particular paradox the other day. It said that in every seven years, every cell of the human body gets replaced by a new one. The question is, if each and every cell in our body is changed to new in a lap of seven years and we physically become a new person then how can we say that we are still ourselves? How can we call us by our birth names, when in fact that body no longer exists. 

This makes me wonder about how people change. Not just physically but mentally and emotionally as well. Some nights, I lie awake in my bed and wonder about how I've changed over the period of time. How I'd never do somethings that the old-me would do without question. I'm no longer that impulsive, carefree and fearless human being who'd do anything without considering the consequences.

Now, I'm different. My choices matter not just to me but to everyone around me. My priorities have changed and so have my outlook towards life and death. Its not that I have become boring, or that I don't occasionally let my self go rogue but in some significant and substantial way, I seem to have changed. 

I think we all do. Become different version of our own self. Changing little things about ourselves everyday until finally, like all our cells, we have completely changed. Become something new. With every habit we drop, with every person we lose, with every mistake we regret, with every new experience and with every new-found passion we gradually turn into someone else. 

Its like we're attached by these million little strings to all those things that make us who we are. These string are our habits, that are hard to break. They are the mistakes we make, and the regrets that keep us from making them again. They are our very basic nature, our strengths and weaknesses. They are our wounds that heal but always leave a scar and we hold on to all these thing for as long as we can. But every new experience ties us to another string and over a period of time we let go of some of the old ones because there are only so many string a person can hold on to. 

Thats how one day we wake up to realize how we have completely changed, one day at time, string by string. Thats when we know that we can never be the person that we once used to be. But our memories are the only thing still anchoring us to our old selves. Reminding us everyday of the impact our choices have left on us. 

I suppose thats how, even though every cell of our body changes in seven years, we still somehow remain the same physically because this change is gradual. Cell by cell. Every cell is a duplicate of the one it replaces. Like an echo of what it used to be. So we are never incomplete.