The Blog of the Long Now

The Long Now is the recognition
that the precise moment you're in
grows out of the past
and is a seed for the future.

-- Brian Eno, "The Big Here and Long Now"

If all goes according to plan, the The Clock of the Long Now and its orrery (tucked away in a remote cave in the Great Basin National Park in Nevada) will dutifully track time through 10,000 years, a vast epoch of humanity. The tenable future conjured up from a long existence brimming with potential encourages us to veer from the prevailing dystopian vision.

The Clock of the Long Now will serve as an icon to spawn storytelling and myth, to encourage contemplation of the span of time and the place of us who exist in it both as individuals and a civilization. It is the kindly neighbor passing time on a porch swing and suggesting you consider not just your itinerary for the next week, or your plans for the next summer vacation, but the far, distant time extending many generations hence.

I like the idea of challenging people to mull over the possible future thousands of years down the timeline from us. It may cause us to exercise predictive muscles elsewise left to atrophy.

Give the star-gazing and wonderment its due, but then collapse all that back from the mainspring of celestial orbits and burrow down to the details of you. Think of it as a holistic philosophy to gaze at both stars and navels (omphaloskepsis!). Consider the instant of your existence and how that weaves into the fabric of the Long Now.

“Ultimately, however, it is only the lived, felt relationships that we daily maintain with one another, with the other creatures that surround us and the terrain that sustains us, that can teach us the use and misuse of all our abstractions.” [David Abram, Becoming Animal]

Perhaps we could one day measure existence not in decades or seasons or millennia or predictable intervals, but the fractals of personal relationships.