ZEN

An ancient Zen Master, who can be found to this day in a Himalayan Buddhist monastery, was once asked how he reached the esteemed ageless age of 150, while not looking over 70. The Zen Master looked hard over the horizon, as people of real age usually do, taking in the surroundings, the only forms of life older than him. Lastly, he answered with the following analogy: "The ducks migrate yearly, never questioned as to what reasons have led them to change their background biome every year. That is not to say that no reason is behind their calling. Some beings take over 100 years to synchronize with the world; some are just born with that ability." The old man paused, considering; every action preemptively contemplated throughout, breathing the mountainous air, microscopic shards of ice entered his lungs. At last he continued: "Let me tell you a story I have heard from my papa, who heard the same story from his papa, and this story has been passed on along with the flame of the gods, or even before that. Time is like a woven net, in which truth inevitably gets caught, some elements are left with the times, just like our dead, some unavoidably are seen this day too. The story goes as this: at the pit of the Earth there is a device, this thing is not just any device, it is the phantom component of life itself. It ushers life here from the moment of creation to their date of expiration. This device is the bottleneck of the life force. When there are too many forms of life existing on Earth, all of us live less. Life is a shared existence, meaning that if just one thing would exist here, it would live to just about forever. Papa told me once that as a kid he thought knowing the truth ultimately cancels our bloodline from the circle of life. He may have been on to something. He has lived to be 420 years, at his end."