Running amok

I often joke around with my colleagues that I am reading so much and spending so much time at work these days because I didn't study hard enough when I was in school, and this is payback time.  College for me was all fun and very little studying except before exams.  I think Jason will disagree and say, "you don't even study before the exams!"

Even though I don't remember much from college, several classes in Physiology did make an impression on me.  One of the topics were on thermoregulation and how 'automatic' our bodies respond to the changes in external temperature without our commands and without our control.  For example, when you walk into an air-conditioned room on a hot summer day, you do not provide your endocrine system with instructions on how the system should perform and react to the temperature change.  You do not walk out of a heated room into the snow with directions to constrict blood vessels to prevent heat loss.  The body adjust to the environment without your involvement, and it just does what needs to be done.  If the body needs commands to adjust to external temperature, a lot of us will be in a lot of trouble, especially the forgetful ones!  

Many of our bodily functions rarely need us or allow us to participate in their operations.  Our heart beats, our intestines absorb nutrients, our pupils dilate and constrict, and there are a lot of examples!  

Then, what about our emotions, thoughts, and feelings?  We think we have control over all of them because the emotions, thoughts, and feelings are "ours".  But our hearts, intestines, and pupils are also "ours", why don't we get a say on how they operate?  

In the past year, I have been "catching myself" a lot more than I used to.  I will be walking very fast with my shoulders back and chest forward.  Then, I will hear my footsteps, then I will choose to slow down.  However, before I have heard my own footsteps, I didn't have a choice to walk fast or to slow down because the walking-fast has been programmed into me as a reaction to some external stimuli such as stress.  How often can we catch ourselves when our mind, body, and spirit have been trained to react a certain way to various circumstances?  Are you sure that our emotional, thinking, and feeling systems are really "ours" and that our bodies are not just directing traffic without our commands?