Deep Time: The Lost Art of Contemplating Time

How Long is Your Timeline?

Let me ask you this,

How long is your timeline?

The one in your head when you think about all the things you make decisions about? Shopping, buying / renting a house, choosing a career, a partner, a holiday?

For me it’s variable.

Sometimes immediate, mundane, regular, ‘when is my neighbour going to bed and when will that music go off?’

Sometimes it spans weeks or months, ‘when will I next hug my son in Australia?’

And sometimes I lose completely the sense of time and there is a thought without time, I wonder what a world would look like if we de-coupled capitalism from individualism?’

There’s no right or wrong here, but it occurs to me that I often forget that I’m part of a much longer timescale—one that spans millennia, and more than that, planetary evolution timescales that make my brain fuzzy to try and imagine, but that I can, just about, sense exist.

Deep Time…

I have a colleague who loves to talk about impact in the world (and I have no problem spending many hours on that topic with her!).

Usually she means it within her working career, sometimes within the next couple of years, but sometimes we stray into the territory of what I call ‘deep time’; that long, almost ‘forever away’ time horizon that take us into discussions far, far from anything personal and well into an imagined future humanity.

I love that space—the wonderings, the magic, the imaginary but yet also the tantalisingly solid.

Even though something may be far-away in my mind, I know that just imagining it makes it real somehow.

A Lost Art?

It feels a little as if we (or maybe it’s an “I”, I can only ever speak for myself after all) have lost the art of holding a timescale that spans a future for humanity, and even a future beyond.

Sure we have the sci-fi movies, the conspiracy nuts, and the scientific explorations,

But, what about the simple musing? The sense of something beyond whether I choose to open Facebook or LinkedIn as my next action.

I'm certain that humans are designed for these deeper contemplations, and, I also witness, and am part of social and economic systems that incentivise and reward the immediate.

It's good to remember the difference sometimes, and to remind ourselves of what can arise when we spend a lot of ‘time’ in one or the other.

Consequentially Selfish?

A tendency to shorter timelines results in a personal and collective selfishness, unintentional and innocent, yes, but different decisions are made when the short-term looms larger than the far distant long-term.

I am certainly no better or worse than you, the person reading this; I’m not intending to preach, I’m simply recording how it feels as I write.

Noting down the noticing. And wondering, even in the many, many discussions around ‘impact’, are we still focussing on an immediacy that does not reflect the reality of universal time?

In my head I make this mean something about society—that we place a high value on personal gain and we’ve forgotten the irrelevance of our two score years plus ten in the grander scheme of life on the planet.

Again, not meaning to preach, just to notice and share.

A Sense of, Rather Than a Strategy For

There are also moments when I lose all sense of time, when I feel as if ‘time’, chronos to use the original Greek, does not exist.

Moments when there becomes something infinite about time, that feeling of enhanced awareness, what people call flow, where noise quietens and we touch something beyond space, time and matter.

As Einstein (allegedly) said,

Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.

I love that feeling, it’s liberating, and I also think I take wiser decisions when I’m aware of and remember that space. My decisions come from a more loving, more patient, less short-term, less self-centred place.

And maybe that’s enough?

When we can experience and remember a sense of something beyond our tiny mind and our nanoscopic lifespan, that’s all we need. We have ways of weighting time in policy-making but, at a personal level, it feels like enough to remember the experience, to have a sense of something infinite, something that is me, and also beyond me.

It’s beautiful and also humbling, reminding me that I am, truly, insignificant.

But in a good way ;-).

With love,

Cathy