Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

Though it is where we live and what we all we know firsthand, the fact remains that there is nothing special about now. Now is but the current moment in an unbroken, seamless stream of time, which cares nothing about the problems, the mores, the beliefs or the inhabitants of any particular moment. Time just is. People, redwood trees, mountains and fruit flies come and go. Time doesn’t care. It’s just now, all the time.
 

Though people have trouble visualizing long periods of time in either direction, we usually find it easier to think about the past than the future. At least when talking about the past we have our history to reflect on, something concrete. When pondering the future we commonly fall into futuristic but silly images like Buck Rogers or the Jetsons. However, we commonly stand in awe when presented with artifacts from the past. Whether we’re looking through a glass case at the objects that were in Lincoln’s pockets at the time of his assassination, gazing at the Great Wall of China, holding relics from ancient Rome, or a shard of pottery dating from the last ice age, if it’s old, we grow somber with the gravitas of physically connecting with the ages.

People stand slack-jawed before Egyptian mummies and tools from the Stone Age found at some archeological site. We treat relics from the past with respect bordering on the sacred. We take great care to protect and preserve these things, spending lots of money and using our best technology. We would do well to regard the future with the same sense of awe and respect. Time goes both ways and we are part of the past and the future. Our sense of responsibility and perspective should project forward as well as backward. We don’t have physical things from the future to hold and care for, but with a long-term perspective we can learn to treat our actions today with the same sense of fragileness with which we treat relics from the past.

Ironically, while we revere old things, we seem unaware that everywhere we go we are surrounded by ancient objects. Go outside and pick up a rock—any rock—and I can pretty much guarantee that it’s infinitely older than anything you can find in an ancient history museum. The river near your home has been flowing for thousands of years; those hills in the distance were formed millions of years ago. The dirt beneath your feet has been here in one form or another since the formation of the Earth. Every living thing you see, from a butterfly to a giraffe to a hickory nut, represents the leading edge of billions of years of evolution; the bodies change but the life continues, leaping from generation to generation. The very atoms that make up your body have existed since the formation of the universe. Before they joined to form you, they spent billions of years as part of the vast cosmos of the universe, perhaps being transformed in the heart of an ancient star, light years away and long deceased, or as part of a swirling dust cloud circling another galaxy. Today, those same atoms have mysteriously come together for a very short time to be part of you. Someday soon they will go on to be a part of something else. We are inextricably tied to the farthest reaches of the past and the future. Billions of years have passed; there are billions more to come. We are surrounded at every moment by the stuff of the ages.