Food for Thought

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Live as if you were to die tomorrow,
Learn as if you were to live forever.

--- Mahatma Gandhi

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From the middle of life onward,
only he remains vitally alive
who is ready to die with life.

--- Carl Jung

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Grow old with me,
the best is yet to come.

--- Robert Browning

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The quality,
not the longevity,
of one's life is what is important.

--- Martin Luther King

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I died a mineral
and became a plant,
I died plant
and rose an animal,
I died an animal
and I was Man.
Why should I fear?
When was I less by dying?

--- Rumi

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Candles Burning Down

TIME IS RELATIVE

Einstein was right - in this three dimensional plane we call our Universe, time is relative. In fact, time is often referred to as the fourth dimension. And being relative, time seems to move quicker as we age.

When we are young, time seems to go by slowly. We are not 6 years old, we are 6½. We can hardly wait until we are 13 to be an "official" teenager. Sixteen takes forever to come so we can drive a car and getting to be 21 to be viewed as an adult seems an eternity.

All of a sudden, we hit 30 in a blink of an eye with 40 and 50 passing by at warp speed. Our beautiful babies end up in college, married and have children of their own in the time it takes to turn pages of a photo album. Time seems like a picture show flashing before our eyes (and in reality, it is).

THE NORMAL AGING PROCESS

Aging is an unavoidable part of the human condition and there are a variety of things we can expect to physically happen to us as we age:

WHY DO WE AGE ?

Scientifically there is what is called the Hayflick Limit which says our cells have a limited capacity for dividing (growing).

It has been shown that if we take fetal lung tissue and put it in a laboratory dish, the cells will subdivide (grow). If we then take two samples from the dish and put them in two new dishes, they too will continue to subdivide (grow). The problem comes in around the 50th time we repeat the process - at some point the cells stop dividing (growing).

PHYSICAL DEATH

As time progresses, some of our human cells start to mutate and our protein molecules start containing errors which are no longer self correcting (earlier in life, mutations are often self correcting).

From a clinical perspective, physical death is the beginning of the irreversible deterioration of our bodies. So, to some degree, we are dying from the moment we are born. We biologically die in bits and pieces.

From a practical perspective, we physically die when we experience brain death which is the death of our human organism as a whole.

Check Back Often

In this section we will be adding pages on the body with respect to such things as diet, exercise, chakras, energy channels, slowing aging, integrative medicine, etc.

We will also be adding material on keeping the mind fully functioning, slowing memory loss and living our human journey in as healthy and blissful manner as possible.

Then too, we will address a topic many want to avoid thinking about but it is an unavoidable part life - death and dying.