(The Japanese Art of Naikan, and) Thanking Our Mitochondria

As our readers in the United States celebrate a holiday of gratitude, I am moved to shine a spotlight on Naikan, a Japanese practice of introspection that can help us better understand, and nurture thankfulness for, our relationships. At the heart of Naikan are three questions that we can ask ourselves in relation to other people in our lives: What have I received? What have I given? What troubles and difficulties have I caused? When we meditate on these points, according to Gregg Krech, author of Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection, we broaden our view of reality. “It’s as if,” he writes, “standing on the top of a mountain, we shift from a zoom lens to a wide-angle lens.” Below is a short essay from Gregg’s book on Naikan in which he directs gratitude to some of the most essential and overlooked entities in our lives – thank you, tiny, unseen, hard-working mitochondria!

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Who Am I?

Have you thanked your mitochondria today? As we continue to investigate who we are, who is the “I” that is conducting the investigation? Discoveries in the last decades have shed light on our biological makeup and called into question our assumption that we are an identity separate from the rest of the world. At the interior of our cells are small entities called mitochondria.

Mitochondria are like tiny power plants designed to convert oxygen and nutrients into usable energy for this body I have always thought belonged to “me.” These creatures swim around in the cytoplasm of our body’s cells. A single cell may contain from tens to hundreds of them.

Functioning as a biological power plant, they produce the fuel for all the activities of the body’s cells. Without the mitochondria, we could not move our toe, blink our eyelids, or even think a thought. As molecular biologist David Clayton explains, “The alternative to functioning mitochondria is called death.”

What is particularly interesting is that these little entities are not really “ours.” They maintain their own DNA, a kind of genetic map, which is quite different from “our” DNA, which is stored inside the cell’s nucleus. The mitochondria maintain themselves and reproduce in their own fashion. These little entities resemble much more the germs that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever or the bacteria on the roots of beans than they do “us.” Yet they populate the human body in great numbers. Biologist Lewis Thomas estimates that “there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me.”

The discovery of mitochondria and their unusual character casts biological doubt on the fundamental nature of our separate identity. We may readily admit that we exist in an interdependent state with the world “out there,” needing food, water, and air for basic survival. But now it appears that we exist interdependently with entities “in here,” requiring their efforts just to move our eyes across this page.

So what is really “out there” and “in here”? Where does “me” end and “not-me” begin?

Where are the boundaries between “us” and “not-us”? Surely it is not this thin layer of skin that encloses this body. The body always appeared to be our clearly definable identity. Its perimeter was our national security boundary. Everything inside this three-dimensional line is my territory: Don’t cross this line. Don’t touch “me.” But how do we explain our tears when we see a picture of a starving child in Africa? How do we explain the feeling of joy when we hear that a baby was just rescued from the rubble of an earthquake in India? These events “out there” sometimes touch us “in here.” When we consider mitochondria, or childbirth, or composting, the question of our identity begins to blur. Perhaps our bodily boundaries are simply an illusion. We seem to be tenants who are simultaneously subletting our space and, from time to time, we ponder, and search for, the landlord.

We are not the only beings to be graced by the efforts of mitochondria. They exist in birds, dolphins, seaweed, my dog, and the little squirrels who cleverly invent ways to invade the bird feeder on my porch. Thomas writes of the mitochondria,

Through them I am connected; I have close relatives, once removed, all over the place. This is a new kind of information, for me, and I regret somewhat that I cannot be in closer touch with my mitochondria… I cannot help thinking that if only I knew more about them, and how they maintain our synchrony, I would have a new way to explain music to myself.

I must admit that throughout my entire life, or at least until recently, I have taken mitochondria for granted. I did not thank them, or appreciate them, or intentionally do anything for them. I just continued to live my life: eating, breathing, blinking, talking, thinking, and, every once in a while, pondering the question of who I am. All the while the mitochondria community was working round the clock to pump out enough energy so these things could be done. They’ve done a pretty good job, I think.

So as I look at what I’m writing, I say thank you to the mitochondria in my optic nerve. And while I’m at it, I might as well thank the rest of them for all their hard work over these many years. But the energy for saying thank you or for writing it, or even thinking it, comes from the efforts of the mitochondria. Without them, thank-yous would be impossible. So I can’t even say thank you without help. But then, who is it that’s really doing the thanking?

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