Dear Blood Pumpers,

Our body is constantly carrying-out processes that keep us alive. Fortunately for us, most of those processes happen automatically, and we don’t have to worry about them.  One such process is circulation. You probably know that blood is super important to keeping us alive (blood is often used as a metaphor for our deepest and truest selves), but our circulatory system is really just a giant delivery system. It’s a huge network of blood vessels that keeps blood flowing to all of our body cells and back to the heart, lungs, and digestive system to get more oxygen and nutrients.

Network is an important word that we’ll see again and again as we study the processes that keep us alive. A network is a bunch of individual things working together to accomplish one goal. The circulatory system is one of many, many things in nature that work in a networked way. By studying the circulatory system as a network, we practice the type of thinking that will better help us understand the rest of the world.

When we learn something new, we should think more about the how of learning than the what. The what is easily forgotten, but the how stays with us forever.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck