Life is too short (or is it too long?) to ...

I was sitting at the local Starbucks near the office and saw a sign across the street in a store that said "Life is too short to drink bad coffee or wear boring clothes."  I suppose the store must have been a women's clothing shop which also had a cafe, I've never been inside and have never explored the area directly across the street.  But I thought, didn't the store owner mean to say that 'Life is TOO LONG, rather than too short, to drink bad coffee or wear bad clothes?"  Wouldn't that be closer to the truth?  I wonder if I should go across the street and cross out the word "short" in the sign, and write over it, "LONG", because I think that's what she must have meant.  For how could life possibly be too short, when whatever length of time we have, we still have time to deal with?

Because if life were very short, say one day, then surely we could put up with bad coffee, boring clothes, or just about anything else - if we only had to put up with it for a day.  But for most of us, life is longer than a day, and so if we choose the wrong coffee, we have to put up with bad coffee for many days, perhaps years, and so many cups of bad coffee, or boring clothes, as the case may be.  It's not gonna be just one cup.  If it were, it would be ok.  But seeing as we have many, many cups of coffee in life to put up with, we may as well drink good coffee.  Isn't that what the author of the sign really meant?  It's not that life is too short to . . [insert whatever here], it's rather that life is TOO LONG to put up with the things we don't want to put up with on a daily basis, over and over again.  

So we might as well pace ourselves, given how many days we have to endure, and see to it that our coffee is acceptable FOR THE LONG HAUL, see to it that we are not wearing something we don't want to be wearing every day, since it will not be for just one day, and that we not put up with anything else we should not put up with day after day for many days.  If it were just one day, then maybe it would be ok.  But it's not, it goes on and on.  

So it's not that LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO . . . as we often hear said, as a preface to some complaint or other about daily inconvenience.  It seems to me that rather, LIFE IS TOO LONG TO . . . whatever we are griping about.  To the extent that life consists of a series of pains and boredoms, as I believe Schopenhauer cheerfully pointed out (for it's the depressive writers that actually cheer us up), the difficulty is the longness of life, not its oft-cited brevity.  Because however short our lives are, we still have to contend on a daily basis with time, our foe.  To say that 'life is too short' overlooks this fact, or hides behind the fear of death, which is really what motivates the thought that life is too short - because we're afraid of what comes next.  But if we put that aside for a moment in time, isn't life more often too long rather than too short?  

Or do most people's lives consist of an uninterrupted sequence of one thrill immediately followed by another, with no boring passages in between, no times of waiting, no need for patience, no old age to look towards, nothing but happiness and gratification at every moment?  If that's how it is for you, then perhaps life is too short in your case, or perhaps you are shortening your life by running away from, hiding from and avoiding, the fight against time (perhaps a beneficial activity in the end), by cramming your days with thoughtless busyness.  But if you are like most other people, then there will be some downtime here and there, some uncertainty about when exactly life will end, and plenty of tasks to do until then - in which case we better settle in for the long haul and pace ourselves with respect to how much bad coffee we are willing to put up with, because life is too long to be drinking bad coffee every day.  So let's take the time to brew a decent cup and drink it slowly, mindful that we'll have to do it again tomorrow, and again after that, and again, and again . . .