Life Is Short
Or is it? What's your take? What makes a life long or short? Or is it, what it is?
“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” - Chaucer
There is a strange yet funny thing that we all experience or will experience. Life seems to go by so slow when you are young. It seems like everything takes forever to arrive. Then, one day you wake up and your life is zooming along and you are wondering where the last 10 years went.
There are numerous theories about why this phenomenon of subjective time is almost universal. Here are a few off the top of my head and which I think might be most probable.
Memory bias. With age, the rate of new experiences lessens and so time seems to pass quicker. Our memories are biased and full of those of our youth. Recent ones are fewer (comparatively) and thus, the illusion of time passing quickly.
Brain and neural changes. With age, our brain develops and expands its neural network. But the machinery gets older, less efficient. Signals travel longer distances, more time passes between our mental images. Slower processing times = more frames per second. Thus, time is less remembered. The mind’s eye theory.
A theory of matter. Entropy. As things decay, much is lost. We are all on a trajectory of disappearing, heading towards a state of disorder. As things break down on a quantum level, we lose “time matter” and this causes us to think of time as passing more quickly. It also suggests that maybe 60 seconds doesn’t always = a minute. With age, a minute might be 59 seconds.
Perhaps, it is a melange of the above reasons. Maybe, life just becomes too routine. We notice less, less surprises or excites us. We become immune to the newness of life. And, in this way, we experience time flying.
Whatever the reason, we do experience time as going by faster, with age. Studies comparing age and time estimation tell us so, although this scientist thinks differently. I’ll be 60 soon and I can tell you as an experiment of one, time is flying by VERY fast. But it is, what it is - said the Capo.
[Highly recommend this essay about time - excellent]
99% of our brief time spent here on planet Earth is spent in a set skin. 99% is filler, boredom, ritual, routine, dross, or banality. Going to the bathroom, brushing your teeth, eating, pissing, sleeping, sitting doing nothing, scratching your crotch, washing the dishes … It is as if the purpose of our being here is to draw it out as long as possible - like the most boring movie possible, that you can’t turn off or escape from watching. A reality TV, 24/7 nightmare.
“Presently, he will forget all this. What is most of his life, even to himself, but background noise? … They are dreary, insignificant details - yes - but repetitive like rites, and that is the key, for a steady drip can drive men mad; the feet of the faithful, the repeated steps of the common people, can slope a granite stair, and a cancer can begin in the corner of a mouth where for thirty years, a pipe’s been griped.” - William Gass, Mr. Blotner, Mr. Feaster, And Mr. Faulkner, A World Within The Word.
I’ll leave it at this, life is short. However long you live.
Life Is Short
Ask Maradona, ask Marilyn
Ask your dog, her cat.
Ask the mayflies on your window
or the mosquito you just smashed.
Ask the 1,000s of micro-organisms
expunged with each breath you take.
"It is what it is." - said the Capo.
It's a bloody holocaust out there.
Each and every second.
As much death as life -
death, the dark matter of existence.
Nobody sees it
Until it is too late.
We're all just a smudge
on the window of time.
Nobody talks about
the glue factory around the corner.
It's all pomp and pretense.
Self-help haikus and macrobiotics.
Puffed up purpose.
There IS NO PURPOSE.
What it all comes down to is
life is too short.
The best of us laugh and
get the joke
tick tock, tock tick
waiting until the wet rag
runs across our chalkboard
and we are no more
forgotten like Shakespeare,
Midas or Maradonna
will be
and like this poem.
Now.