Once there was a moment poised in the middle of the middle of the middle, just like any other moment.
Freeman Dyson:
The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.
Dyson: From Eros To Gaia, (New York: Pantheon, 1992) p. 341
I found that paragraph in Stewart Brand's book, "The Clock of the Long Now.".
Once there was a moment poised in the middle of the middle of the middle, just like any other moment.
In Hindi, the word for
today is
aaj.
The word for yesterday is also the word for tomorrow: kal. The word for "nowadays" is aaj-kal — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And not only that, the word for day-before-yesterday is also the word for day-after-tomorrow!
This shows us something about how traditional Indian thinkers understand time: now is bracketed, fore and aft, by an ever-shifting, ever-rearranging set of possibilities and consequences.
Today is the day-after-tomorrow you worried about day-before-yesterday, and the day-before-yesterday you'll remember day-after-tomorrow.
Applying this understanding to grander temporal scales, we realize: to know a historical past is to imagine a possible future; as far back as we record and remember, that far forward we necessarily imagine and conjecture.
According to Hindu mythology and Vedic cosmology the universe is cyclically created and destroyed. The life span of Lord Brahma, the creator, is 100 'Brahma-Years'. One day in the life of Brahma is called a Kalpa or 4.32 billion years.
Wiki
Every
now is the hinge for decades, centuries, millennia stretching out ahead and behind us. The more history we learn, the more future we conceive.
Imagine a moment where hundreds of thousands of humans recognized that their relationship with a far-distant past demands a relationship to an equally-distant future.
Let's see how far distant.
Let's say there were 400,000 people in New York last Sunday. Keeping things easy for ourselves, we'll assume another 100,000 people worldwide for a total of 500,000 people, with an average age of...oh, let's say 30. Multiply 30 x 500,000 and you get 15,000,000, which is the approximate total human life-years protesting for climate sanity on Sunday.
Fifteen million is a lot of years. Fifteen million years ago there weren't any humans to speak of. Yet the Carboniferous Era was around 350 million years ago — more than twenty times more!
Oil and coal are the accumulated and fossilized sunlight of those ancient days, and one of Earth's greatest treasures.
To grasp their incredible antiquity is inevitably to imagine an equidistant future, and to engage with them physically (by digging them up and burning them) is to assume responsibility for that future.
Once there was a moment poised in the middle of the middle of the middle, just like any other moment.
What have we done?
As the consequences of global heating become obvious to all but the intentionally ignorant, humanity faces the fact: we've squandered our inheritance in a dissolute spasm of consumption and greed.
In the country song "El Paso," the protagonist shoots a man in a moment of reckless anger, and "Just for a moment, I stood there in silence / Shocked by the foul evil deed I had done / Many thoughts raced through my mind as I stood there / I had but one chance, and that was to run."
Everyone knows what it feels like to make a mistake. Whether it's that instant in an argument when you realize that in fact the other person is right, or when you realize that in fact you were the one being a jerk, or that in fact it was the previous exit, there is always that moment of startled comprehension and stunned internal blankness as one's world rearranges itself.
Once there was a moment poised in the middle of the middle of the middle, just like any other moment.
Thus the shocked, emotionally-charged moment of silence on Sunday's march. I was not the only one weeping in those few seconds in New York where we felt ourselves at the hinge of history.
Unlike the anonymous narrator of Marty Robbins' ersatz cowboy ballad, our one chance is not to run. Where to? There is no "away."
Well, we may be pathetic, but it has to be us.
We can't run, but we can march. And we can balance that harrowing silence with the concerted roar of a half-million throats — sounding the alarm and affirming a collective readiness to fight the greatest threat our species has ever faced.
Once there was a moment poised in the middle of the middle of the middle, just like any other moment.
Jackson Brown's song says it well.
"If I could be anywhere (and change the outcome), it would have to be here."
Here we are.