Deep Time: The Lost Art of Contemplating Time

Cathy Presland
4 min readMay 27, 2021

How long is your timescale? And what difference does that make?

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

How Long is Your Timeline?

Let me ask you this,

How long is your timeline?

The one in your head when you think about all the things you make decisions about? Shopping, buying / renting a house, choosing a career, a partner, a holiday?

For me it’s variable.

Sometimes immediate, mundane, regular,

When is my neighbour going to bed and when will that music go off?

Sometimes it spans weeks or months,

When will I next hug my son in Australia?

And sometimes I lose completely the sense of time and there is a thought without time,

I wonder what a world would look like if we de-coupled capitalism from individualism?

There’s no right or wrong here, but it occurs to me that I often forget that I’m part of a much longer timescale-one that spans millennia, and more than that, planetary evolution timescales that make my brain fuzzy to try and imagine, but that I can, just about, sense exist.

Deep Time…

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Cathy Presland

What if making an impact was part of your everyday? Stories to light up your soul. Read more and free courses: https://cathypresland.com/