Time

The time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as the summers of childhood.  There was time enough for once to do nothing...
                            - Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire


Nothing is more rock solid than rock.  "Grounded."  "Foundation."  "Earth."  Of course we mean immovable.  And yet, it must move.  The orogeny that gave us the mountains standing solidly before us are proof that they must move.  Perhaps even more than astronomy, the time scale befuddlement that the geological implications of mountains can have on us is truly profound.

Centimeters a century of movement.  Mountains several kilometers high.  Tally the infinite ledger in your mind and then stand the equivalent ledger of a single lifespan, or even the lifespan of the human race, next to it.  Maybe there is time enough for once to do nothing.

Remember when I took you to the Grand Canyon and showed you the strata?  The strata that marks a time span utterly beyond any real comprehension?  And yet the observable strata that remain in the Canyon's walls are a fraction of earth's history.  The voids and nonconformities dwarf the layers that so inspire us.  Stand next to the Muav limestone.  Realize that it is 500+ million years worth of sea life living and dieing, living and dieing, living and dieing, incrementally adding their shells to the Calcium at the bottom of a shallow sea that will someday become a cliff we can touch.  So what is time?

We yearn for time's structure to yoke our modern lives to.  Time is the only true commodity in a human life and we lament that we don't have enough of it.  But what do we tend to balk when confronted with moment of unscheduled, unstructured time in our life.  The mountains should be proof enough that we don't really understand time.