I remember hearing that on average human cells are replaced every 7-10 years. However, unlike the ship of Theseus not every cell is replaced. Some eye lens cells last a lifetime and there are other cells, such as some in our hearts, that can live for over 50 years. That said, at 53 most of the the cells that made me me when I was born have been replaced, some every couple days, some over years.

Last night coming home from Nanaimo, back to the mainland on the ferry across the Strait of Georgia, I was mesmerized by the standing wave made by the boat. I watched the wake of the boat out over the railing on an opening on the car deck, and stared at the water dancing across this wake. It occurred to me that despite the wake being consistently the same distance from the boat, as I stared at the wake, I was staring at a constant flow of water being replaced by water coming off of the front of the boat. The wave stays the same, but the water is constantly and completely changing.

Inversely, we tend to try to stay the same in an ever-changing world. We develop metaphorical standing waves that treat everything that comes our way the same. We develop patterns of behaviour where we react the same way to people and situations that come our way. Yes, we learn and we grow, but more slowly as we age. We tend to find comfortable, repeatable ways of facing life’s challenges in the same way. Some of us being more like small sail boats that confront every wave a little differently as our boat adjusts, and others more like a massive tanker ship, that keeps the same standing wave in all but the roughest of seas.

What standing waves do we create in our lives? What do we tend to leave in our wake? I’ve met selfish people that leave turmoil and chaos in their wake and go through life selfishly disrupting other people’s wakes, and I’ve met others that are selfless and worry more about helping others with their wakes than worrying about their own. The most dangerous of all are those that think the are the latter but are actually the former… they think they are what makes the seas calm while they themselves are hurricanes, unaware that they are in the calm of the eye of the storm they create, while those around them face the tumultuous winds and rough seas.

We should all think about the wake we create, and we would be advised to keep out of the wake of people who create disruptive waves. And while we slowly replace ourselves with our future selves, we need not create the same old standing waves if they don’t serve us well and move us in a direction we want to go.