“Soon man will count all his days, an then smaller segments of the day, and then smaller still – until the counting consumes him, and the wonder of the world he has been given is lost.”
– The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom
I am still in progress with this painting, so will update this video once I’ve done more work on this. (***UPDATED 30 October 2024***)
I have been keeping a journal of my meditation sessions. These are ‘field notes’ about a particular meditation session some months ago where I really focused on the concept of deep time, and the idea that time is a social construct:
26 April 2024
Deep Time – Time is but a social construct
Humans are clever – I’ll give them that – for figuring out the exact calculations of a 24 hour day, with 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, a (roughly) 30/31 day calendar month (and a crude adjustment in February to boot), a 12 month year, and then to make devices that keep count of all of this.
What is time though, but a mere one-sided observance of a perpetual and neverending circling of one planet (the earth) around its star (the sun), inside one galaxy, in an infinite sea of other planets, stars and galaxies, all circling and swirling at different rates.
If time is based on how long it takes a planet to circle the sun, then it is only on earth that our time is applicable – what an utterly anthropocentric concept. Mercury’s days are 1408 hours long, Venus’ days are 5832 hours long, Mars: 25 hours, Jupiter: 10 hours, Saturn: 11 hours, Uranus: 17 hours, Neptune: 16 hours.
On a universal level, say, if you were a planet floating in the milky way, what does it matter what time it is on one planet, and only because one species said that that’s what time and date it is? And in the greater scheme of deep time, thinking about the idea that it’s been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang (and that’s still not where time started, but merely a cosmic event), what is a month? A day? 70 years? 2000 years? When thinking about Deep Time, our current observance of time and calendaring are meaningless on a celestial level.
Even here on earth, no other creature or non-creature knows or cares what our human-construct time is.
Debbie New 