The Last Word On Nothing

Happy New Year, for what a year is worth given the light of Betelgeuse fading from the shoulder of the constellation Orion. Thanks to Ann for pointing that out last week, and that it may have gone supernova hundreds of years ago and no longer exists.

Beginning of January, heart of winter, is a good time to think about time, figure out where we are in the scheme of things. I stand on a boulder sticking up from snow in the yard and spot where the sun’s been setting on its post-solstice turnaround, creeping day by day northward, proof the clock is still ticking.

We each find a sense of time for ourselves: light comes low under south-facing eaves, alarm goes off in the morning announcing the stirring.

A video called Time Lapse of the Future was put up by Melodysheep last year, a CGI remix with an original, spectacular musical score and voiceovers pulled off the internet from scientists and the likes explaining states of universal expansion over an unthinkable amount of time. Along with David Attenborough and Stephen Hawking, I’m one of the voices. Notwithstanding, it’s a brilliant concoction, well worth the 29 minutes it takes to go from 2019 to a thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years from now. Along the bottom of the screen, numbers of years show speed doubling every 5 seconds, an ever-accelerating rocket into the future. You’ll feel like you’re going to pop the whole time: asteroids, supernovae, end of the age of starlight, the reign of blackholes, Hawking radiation, etc.

Here’s an exercise you can do with this video. Pour yourself a cup of tea, or a stiff scotch, watch it beginning to end, the earth vaporized within the first four minutes all the way out to when time is deemed meaningless, then attempt to make sense of your weekly calendar.

Try this stretching exercise daily if you can. Find a star, then check the time on your phone. Look at a mountain or any tectonically-altered landform, then try getting impatient in traffic.

One might have trouble rectifying the geological/astronomical sense of time with that of a finite living organism. The answer is, be aware of both. Inhale…exhale.

In the summer, the sun sets nearly on the other side of the sky from where it sets now. Standing on that boulder in the yard, I know exactly where it will touch down on a pine-topped rise across rock scarps to a mountain range standing like an island 13,000 feet tall. Each point of sunset is another position in the season, from Frozen-Crystal-Moon to Nighthawk-Booming-Dusk. When do holiday decorations come down? Where do neap tides come high? When does sap flow? How dark is the drive home?

On this new year, new decade, as stars wane and brighten, let’s all take a deep bow toward the ground wherever we are, stretching from the soles of our feet down to the molten nickel and iron core of the planet. Now, rise up vertebra by vertebra, through our beating hearts, out our fingertips, and to the farthest quasars that died so long ago no language will suffice.

Now, shake it off.

Photo of the last sunset of 2019 from western Colorado, Craig Childs