Open Writing

Time has swallowed up the honeyed phrases I used to woo and win the current Mrs. Hill some 35 years ago, but I must have been hitting on all cylinders. Our wedded bliss was forecast by an early computer program I came across years later that predicted biorhythms based on birthdates. It also could compare your biorhythms with another’s, and I discovered that while my mate and I are polar opposites when it came to the rhythms of physical vitality and emotional highs and lows, we’re on nearly identical tracks intellectually. It’s nice that one of us is generally healthy when the other’s ill and optimistic when the other is blue, but not going through life together feeling dumber or sharper than the other has been a special blessing.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “biorhythm” as “An innate, cyclical biological process or function.” This is similar to its definition of another mammalian rhythm known as “circadian”: “Relating to or exhibiting approximately 24-hour periodicity.” “Circadian” comes from the Latin “circa,” or “around,” and “dies,” which means “day.” Our circadian cycles, “internal clocks,” can be disrupted by rapidly crossing time zones. Also called “jet lag,” it’s described by sleepeducation.com, as “a circadian rhythm sleep disorder that is also called time zone change syndrome. It involves a mismatch in the timing of your natural tendency to be asleep and the time when you are naturally awake … you need to sleep and wake at a time that is different than what your internal body clock expects.”

Daylight plays a big role in circadian cycles, so what does this mean in the Land of the Midnight Sun? Norwegian researchers have found that circadian clocks of reindeer and ptarmigan don’t work when there’s only darkness, but University of Iowa scientists studying in Barrow found that circadian cycles of ground squirrels and porcupines in Barrow work fine in 24-hour sunlight.

This research falls in the realm of chonobiology, a science founded by Franz Halberg http://www.msi.umn.edu/~halberg/ at the University of Minnesota. Halberg was counting blood cells in mice in the 1940s and discovered that the counts rose and dropped dramatically at different times of day. This prompted further study that found that not only do human bodies run on cycles somewhere between 23.5 and 24.65 hours a day, but so do our very cells. Photosensitive proteins trigger cellular circadian cycles that originated in the earliest cells on earth as a method of protecting DNA from ultraviolet radiation by reproducing at night.

Simon Archer, a sleep researcher at Britain’s University of Surrey, studies human “larks and owls” by measuring the times when bodies heat up and produce sleep-inducing melatonin. Archer describes people who rise earlier as larks and the later risers as owls. He says that women are more larkish than men, which certainly holds true at the Hill household, but most are at neither extreme, with only ten percent of us being early-rising larks and another ten percent owls. Archer found that young children are usually larkish, suddenly become owlish at puberty, and then slowly become more larkish until they hit old age, when they become as larkish as they were as children.

Children’s librarians know that morning story-hour times work better than afternoon programs because they better suit kids’ circadian cycles. However, life doesn’t always accommodate circadian clocks. Not everyone can bring their kids to the library on weekday mornings, and that’s why our library schedules evening and weekend story-hours, too.
It’s also why we keep adding useful databases that can be accessed over the internet from home or work. The Small Engine Repair Reference Center http://www.ebscohost.com/thisTopic.php?marketID=6&topicID=777 is the latest, providing manuals and diagrams for fixing ATVs, mowers, tractors, generators, motorcycles, boats, outdoor power equipment, jet skis, snowblowers, snowmobiles, tillers and other small engines. This database is obviously well-suited to the Alaskan lifestyle and ought to prove a real time-saver.

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend,” as pointed out by Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor at the Lyceum. I can’t argue with that but must also agree with the American sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”