Step back in time
The act of walking, as the author and activist Rebecca Solnit describes, is “how the body measures itself against the Earth” and helps put the unfathomable number of Earth’s roughly 4,543,000,000 year history into perspective. It enables us to connect our own short-lived experience of time on Earth with the vast expanse of geological time.
Making the unfathomable, fathomable
We exist largely within a human scale of time. Days, weeks, and deadlines – decades and generations. Rarely do we attempt to comprehend the context of the timescales of the earth, or the universe. Vast, complex, and full of unknowns, the topic requires us to master many disciplines to create a coherent picture of Earth’s history. By walking, and listening to the echoes from deep time, we can begin to build new reference points for understanding and experiencing Earth as what philosopher David Abram calls ‘our own wider body’.
Our sense of time is also affected by the common misrepresentation of the true scale of the history of the earth in popular science books. Due to the practicalities of limited space on the printed page, billions of years are often compressed and simply labelled, for example, ‘Precambrian’ - giving disproportionate prominence to popular topics such as dinosaurs and the evolution of our species.
“Long parts of the walk are silent, as the vast history of our planet awaiting a telling. Right at the last step, Stephan pulls out a tape measure: human civilization. And in the final tiny centimetres, modern industrial society, and all our innovations, hungers, impacts. When we see and feel history on this scale we are unable to stand aside – it is a Deep Experience.”
Chris Nichols, Ashridge Business School