by Elizabeth Trigg

Created on: December 04, 2007   Last Updated: June 29, 2009

My goal of living to be at least 140 sent me studying the lives of everyone who ever lived to be at least 100 years old that I heard about, read about or knew personally. I was fortunate enough to buy a house in the country situated next door to a lady that was 102 years old when I moved in and is now 107. During my stay in that house I visited my neighbor often and inquired about her life as we sat for tea and cake. She was still picking apples off of her tree in her yard and making homemade applesauce.

Her secret, she said, was her fresh country air and peaceful life. She also attributed her longevity to abstinence of alcohol and tobacco. How could she be wrong? I figured by age 102 one should know everything. The only thing that troubled me was the fact that George Burns lived to be 100 and he smoked and drank.
Over the course of my 13 years working in the news field, I occasionally heard centenarians describe their prescription for a long life. One guy's solution was the fact that he'd never gotten married. He said he never had the stress of having a wife and credited living in the mountains with his goats for his longevity.
Such varied answers sent me pondering and searching and questioning the very nature of time itself. Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein and quantum physics provided me with the answers I needed, which in turn substantiated the claims of all the centenarians I'd read about, heard about or talked to.
Time, in reality, does not exist. It is internal. Clocks do not measure time, they measure the degrees of the Earth's rotation. Calendars do not measure time, they measure the revolution of the Earth around the sun. The only thing that truly measures time is our bodies.
You know how time flies when you're having fun? How when you are totally absorbed in something that brings you pure joy time flies? When you "feel" like it has only been 10 minutes and you look at your watch and discover 3 hours have flown by? What has actually happened there, is your body has only aged 10 minutes even though 3 "real world" hours have flown by.
This claim can be also qualified by the other common phenomena of "stress aging a person". I've seen people whose hair has turned completely white after a traumatic incident such as a car accident or something that terrified them. Stress and worry over children or parents, serious illnesses, or other stressful events can dramatically age a person.
You know how it feels when you are waiting for something. Time just drags

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