Your Body’s Cells Can Give You Some Advice On Receptiveness

A biological model for how to be just the right amount of open

Photo by Autumn Goodman on Unsplash

In order to cultivate an identity and a system of beliefs that are consonant with the type of person you want to be, it’s important to figure out a system for what gets in and what stays out.

How do you master the art of being receptive enough to grow but not so malleable that you succumb without discernment to the ideas and rhetoric-driven indoctrination of your external world?

Thanks to an intensely grueling college Bio class, I have a possible answer. (You thought it was going to be Philosophy huh? I don’t blame you.)

After much introspection, here’s my conclusion: we should model our receptiveness after the plasma membrane.

This isn’t intended to be a full-blown biology lesson, but hey, it can’t hurt to learn something about the trillions of cells moving around in your body, making your aliveness a thing that happens.

The plasma membrane lines the cells in your body, protecting their internal environment from the external environment (aka the extracellular environment). This is insanely important because the critical functions that happen inside of a cell require particular environmental conditions, and if too…