A deeper perspective
I’m in the weeds of book research and as a result I’ve been thinking a lot about the same things over and over—trying to get to the core of an idea, of why I’m doing this at all.
When I’ve talked to people about the work I say the book is in large part about deep time, about the unfathomable epochs that stretch from the beginning of time until now with breaks in between. Anyone can learn about this—the big bang, the formation of stars, the formation of galaxies, planets and even the fluke of life. But it’s not just about understanding what deep time is or even the science behind these major moments, but rather it’s a way of thinking.
We live in such chaotic times and speaking only for myself, I desperately try to stay present as challenging as that proves to be every day. We are a future-thinking, future-predicting species—we are always preparing and anticipating what comes next not just next week and next year but years from now. As much as I revel in the mystery and surprises of life, I long for the safety of knowing all the things that will unfortunately or probably fortunately, remain unknowable to me which is what happens to me in the future. Because of this I try to bring myself back around to the present moment which as any mindfulness practice will remind you, it is really all we have. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, nor is the next hour or tonight. This moment is it and each moment that unfolds is borrowed from the ending that awaits all of us.
Having said that though, a big part of my thinking around a lot of what fascinates me about science and the universe is the concept of deep time. I think in this instance it’s about the perspective that knowing these timelines can give us maybe some kind of mental cushion from the mysterious impacts of the future—if we know that for billions of years the universe turned hydrogen into helium and created stellar furnaces that enable the existence of life and that for billions of years massive stars have died in order to make solar systems like ours possible and that all around the 90 billion light years of the known cosmos galaxies have been swirling around on themselves in the same ways and that after we are gone the universe will continue functioning, would that help take a little pressure off of the 5 year plan? Or knowing that one day we’ll be gone and everything will continue without us? Maybe?
On a much smaller scale, the same feelings struck me in Antarctica when I first saw penguins. Granted I had a host of feelings when I first saw them waddling around the ice, fins stuck out to the side trying to keep their balance as though if they could just go a little faster their arms would suddenly lift them into the sky and they’d fly away. These animals, like every other animal in the world, has its known path, an inherent playbook of how to live, how to mate, how to eat and what to do. We have that too even though somehow we all feel like we got punk’d, blindfolded and forced into some human meat bodies that have to pay bills and find food and grapple with the burden of being self aware. The penguins were living their lives, unperturbed by us and I found such immense comfort in their obliviousness to us. I find that’s true of the cosmos as well. We have direct impact on ourselves, on the planet and on each other, but when it comes to the vastness of everything else—we are just a blip on the deep time calendar. Our lives and our deaths ultimately become like layers of rock, so compressed they can become invisible to the naked eye.
Deep time, like nature is cyclical. Endings are a requirement to the continuation and to the beginnings of so many spectacular things—ourselves included. In his book of letters to grieving friends, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to Mimi Romanelli that we must learn how to die. This first section has always reminded me of the ultimate cosmic death and one of the greatest containers of deep time and our own human story that we’ve ever discovered—the supernova.
He writes to her:
“There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die. That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific, and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape. Of a long-ripened death that effaces its hateful name and is nothing but a gesture that returns those laws to the anonymous universe which have been recognized and rescued over the course of an intensely accomplished life. It is this idea of death which has developed inside me since childhood from one painful experience to the next, and which compels me to humbly endure the small death, so that I may become worthy of the one which wants us to be great.”