Tag: Body

T.G.I.F.: It’s been a long week

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I
slowly
withdraw
from
my
body.

~ Anna Kamienska, from A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

Notes: Photo Manipulation by Laurent Rosset (Denmark) (via this isn’t happiness)

Bones to me

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Source: Aparna Nancherla (via Paper Ghosts)

It’s been a long day

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I have been thinking how the body
is a vulture—all avarice and need.
How longing creeps up, stalking
for days, catches with such force
it leaves you breathless.

— Carol V. Davis, from “Need” in Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg

Notes:

Miracle. All of it.

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eye-sleep-face-skin

Each hair on your head is replaced every 2 to 7 years
A hundred hairs fall out every day and new ones grow back in their place

And look at your fingernails – they’re completely new every six months or so

The lining of your stomach and intestines
gets pretty beat up — it’s constantly exposed to acid and bile
and so those cells get replaced every few days

Every few weeks, your outer layer of skin is completely renewed

Every four months you have a fresh army of red blood cells
A hundred million new cells are born every minute and a hundred million old cells are destroyed
It’s actually the breakdown products of these red blood cells that turn your bruises and urine yellow

Every 10 years, you’ve got a new skeleton
a special team of cells breaks down old bone
and another builds new bone

Every 15 years your muscles are refreshed
You might think you gain and lose fat cells when you gain and lose weight
but the actually just get bigger and smaller
Over the course of 25 years though, most of them turn over

But there are a few things that stick around for your entire life

About half of your heart stays with you from birth to death because those cells
are replaced very slowly

Certain parts of your brain add a few new neurons over the course of your life
but the vast majority of your neurons developed before you were born
It’s the connections between those neurons — the circuits that store memories —
that are constantly changing

And there’s one more part of you that lasts your whole life (your eyes)
Months before you were born,
little cluster of cells stretched and filled themselves with transparent protein
As you grew, even after birth, more and more fibers were added, but that center endured
This is your lens the window through which you are watching this video right now
and its core has remained the same since the moment you first opened your eyes

~ Adam Cole and Ryan Kellman, excerpts from Your Body’s Real Age

Notes:

  • Photo:  Bang Sang Hyeok #305 (via Precious Things)
  • Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
  • Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.

 

No other warm-blooded creature lives this way. We alone keep working 24/7, under the false suns of our fluorescent lights.

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Swiping (by Eszter Balogh) DESIGN STORY: | Tumblr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | [[MORE]]

38 percent of Americans describe themselves as “always” feeling rushed. No other warm-blooded creature lives this way: ignoring seasonal patterns, ignoring rest. We alone keep working 24/7, under the false suns of our fluorescent lights. It is as if we hope to rid ourselves of the natural world entirely: discarding not just our own circadian rhythms, but also the larger cycles of the moon and stars, the tides, the solar year. And yet, it is useful, surely, to have some grasp of what the experts call “chronobiology”—to recognize the ways in which our bodies are in fact entrained not to clocks or computers or our weekly schedules, but to the ancient, powerful rhythms of the larger universe. In the course of a day, our hearts will pound out a quiet drum of sixty to eighty beats per minute, speeding up as we race to catch a bus, slowing down when we take a nap. Our body temperatures will rise and fall by a degree or two, reaching peak efficiency late in the afternoon. Our cells will multiply and divide and replace themselves as necessary; hormones and enzymes will be produced. Women in their child-bearing years will move with greater or lesser ease through the different stages of their monthly cycles. Meanwhile, rain or shine, our attention will ebb and flow throughout the day: an hour and a half of concentrated attention, a short break; another hour and a half, another break.

~ Christian McEwen, World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down.

Notes: