crunchytoast said:

is life long or short?

every day is a new day, something new happens every day, there is such variety, i am beginning to think that life is long, even if there's never enough of it

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Life is exactly the correct length.

Quote:

I've always thought everyone who says life is short says it because they don't remember 99.9% of it. If you don't remember 364 out of 365 days of a year, then that year will have flown by in the blink of an eye.

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Quote:

from Dynamics of Time and Space by Tarthang Tulku
When we lose contact with time, we have cut the dynamic central to our lives. . . . Subjectively, there is the sense that time is flickering, like a film not properly adjusted on its reel . . . . There is strain that goes nowhere. . . .

These structures are in place before consciousness fully forms. . . . they give rise to nervous agitation or uneasy pain . . . .

If the momentum of time's forward conducting persists, the agitation and its underlying 'flickering' intensify. Suddenly there is an abrupt break, as if the reel of film . . . had snapped. Everything freezes--movement vanishes. . . . Pain has been transformed into the fixed and rigid structures of linear time. Consciousness emerges into a temporal order in which time is a hostile force . . . . Time in its pastness grinds us down . . . feeding us the lifeless recordings of the past and the seductive fascinations of the future.

Caught in this fabricated past and future, we are divided against ourselves. Our knowledge and energy are spread across the linear length of the temporal order. Thus, when we set a goal, we assign a part of our constructed identity to that goal. Now it is as though a part of us was 'out there' in the future along with our projection, pinned against the temporal horizon of the present moment.

Increasingly confined, we find it deeply disturbing just to inhabit the successive moments of our lives. . . . The specific 'point' of time that we occupy lacks all capacity to hold time's dynamic. Life goes out of the present, drained away 'across' time.

We may respond by withdrawing into a dull numbness that has a quality almost like being shocked or stunned. . . . In our worn-out dullness, we are like a baby that has cried itself into exhausted sleep.

If we could awaken at this point to the feeling of pain, we would actually be close to the original dynamic of the time that we have lost. But this alternative is not available, for we are too closely identified with the pain. As 'I' merge with 'having the pain', I become the victim of what objectified time has presented. I possess the pain and am possessed by it; in this feedback I repossess it, tightening its hold. Awareness arises only in the wake of recognition, and so can lead only in the direction of further identification

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