Food for thought from "Time and the Art of Living" by Robert Grudin:


I.13 - If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds.
        But look at time the other way.  Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds.  During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos.  A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death.  Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.


II.3 - An old tree falls, a landmark is torn down, a career takes a sudden leap or drop, a friend dies of a heart attack; and we view these events as great acts of time, rather than (more accurately) the surface results of processes which continue in all things.


II.12 - The cosmos is not so much a thing in motion as a thing of motion, a complex interplay of energies and paces.


II.20 - Try to make the present memorable; or, failing this, review daily what is important about the present period in your life.  In so doing you will enrich time.


II.24 - What we understand best, we understand by renewal - by looking at the same thing again and again in different ways, looking at it internally and externally, walking around it, turning it in our hands, participating in it until some strange abstract spirit of its being rises from the complexity of effort and detail.