The Daily Planet #121: Timefulness

I have been reading Marcia Bjornerud's "Timefulness" and really enjoying it. The more woke we are, the more we are prone to possessing our experience as somehow uniquely our own, like "this is my reality, and you have no right to doubt it." But that personal reality is embedded in a much larger planetary reality that doesn't care about our I-Me-Myself experiences that much. As Bjornerud says when she visited Svalbard as a graduate student:

On Svalbard, my perception of time becomes unmoored from the normal measures. It is partly the 24- hour summer daylight (not to say actual sunshine— the weather can be quite awful), which provides no cue for sleep. But it is also the singleminded focus on the natural history of an austere world that has so little memory of humans. Just as the size of objects is difficult to judge on the tundra, the temporal space between past events becomes hard to discern. The few human- made artifacts one finds— a tangled fishing net, a decaying weather balloon— seem older and shabbier than the ancient mountains, which are robust and vital.

I don't know (yet) how to cultivate timefulness in a manner that I let go of my possessiveness of my own experiences, but it feels like a skill worth learning.