The brain is a machine, a metronome, orchestrating,
second by second, the workings of our bodies,
all the while conducting us from birth to old age.

"I believe that only one person in a thousand
knows the trick of really living in the present.
Most of us spend 59 minutes an hour living in the past
with regret for lost joys, or shame for things badly done
(both utterly useless and weakening)
or in a future which we longer for or dread.
The only way to live is to
except each minute as an unrepeatable miracle,
which is exactly what it is----
a miracle and unrepeated."
Storm Jameson

"If scientists do manage to locate this 'clock' in our brains,
they may find out what others have suspected all along,
that the clock is responsible for our preoccupation
with variable time....
In 1932 physiologist Hudson Hoagland began to ask why time
tended to fly or drag when his wife was ill with the flu.
She had been lying in bed with a temperature of 104
and had asked her husband to run to the drugstore
to fetch some supplies. When he returned, she was angry.
'Although I was gone for only 20 minutes,' he wrote of the incident,
'she insisted that I must have been away much longer.'
Hoagland was stunned, and fascinated.
'Since she is a patient lady, this immediately set me thinking.'
The reason for this is that heat speeds up chemical reactions.
Indeed, the beating of the hearts of cockroaches
and the frequency of chirping crickets,
which depends on chemical reactions,
increases as a function of temperature.
If time is determined by chemical velocities,
then raising of body temperature should speed up the reactions.
The increased reactions should make more chemical changes
and hence make physiological time pass more quickly
in a given interval of clock time then would normally be the case.
Now, Hoagland believed, he had discovered the same phenomenon
occurring somewhere in his wife's brain....
He asked her to count out loud to 60 'at a speed
she believed to be one per second.'
Days later, when she was well,
Hoagland tested her again and was delighted with the results.
He had discovered that his wife counted faster
when she had a fever than when she did not."
Kenneth Jon Rose

"Yesterday, with the dry leaves shuffling in figure eighties
around my feet on the sidewalk,
I thought about what it was like growing up,
and the feeling came back to me, palpable as fever....
the ubiquitous feeling of waiting for real life to begin,
knowing it was just on the other side of the horizon,
never really sure what it would be, what it was about....
Life was so close you could touch it by the time adolescence arrived.
By then you knew that the only way to get relief
was to hitch your wagon to the milestones.
Senior prom, Graduation Day.
Rehearsals for the main events, which would come later....
One moment we were waiting, waiting for real life to begin,
racing towards milestones only to arrive and say,
"That's all?'
And the next we look around and realise that that IS all,
that somehow without knowing it we have slipped sleepily
into the next three decades of our existence....
One day we realise that we are not waiting but living.
No more will we peg everything on the Christmas holidays, or a new job.
It is only living with the slow beating of our hearts that is real.
his is your life.
It is a strange sea change, pleasant if the horizon looks sunny,
shot with strands of pink & gold.
Soothing even, after all the years of waiting."
Anna Quindlen