Story of the Axe

There are many stories based on the humble axe, like the woodcutter who loses his axe in the river and is given an option by an angel to choose a golden one etc, which teach us about values and morals. There is one other story which really hit home that I want to talk about. While I have told and retold this to many people, I just can't remember where I read it. The reactions to this story has ranged from a "what the hell are you talking about" to " wait a minute, that is really profound". Sometimes some incidents just trigger a kind of epiphany and this one did it to me.

The story as I said is very short. There was once a man who proudly showed his visiting friend an axe and said that this axe has been with his family for almost a century, " we may have changed the head a few times but the handle needed to be changed more often".

That is the story.

Suddenly it hits you that there is not a single thing in that axe, he was showing off, that is 100 years old but in the mind of the friend it is the same axe that has been passed on from his great grandfather!

Take your body. Your body is constantly replacing old cells with new ones. The replacement takes place at the rate of millions of cells per second. By the time you finish reading this sentence, 50 million of your cells will have died and been replaced by others. This is a necessary process in our bodies, some are lost through 'wear and tear', some just reach the end of their life, and others deliberately self-destruct. There are over 50 trillion cells in your body and while I have not been able to find an answer to the question if there are still any cells that I was born with that has not been replaced in my body, I know for a fact that most of them are gone. There are apparently some neurons and muscle cells that are not replaced after adolescence, but you just go one level lower and look at the molecules that make up the cells, they certainly are all different from the time you were born.

So what is the difference between that axe which has lived for 100 years and you? So what is this thing that you call you?