Bend Reality: Wrong Time

Once again, I am on the side of a mountain in Park City, where I lived for eight years. It’s been three years since I left, and there are literally thousands of new residences in and around the town, many—perhaps most—of them built as vacation (i.e. temporary) homes. There’s a sense that Park City is a major resort that will always be a center of tourism.

Nope.

Looking out the window last night at the backside of Deer Valley resort, I got to thinking about time.

Human towns and cities have existed for approximately 10,000 years, a mere blip in Earth's 4.5 billion year history. For roughly 75% of Earth's history (about 3.3 billion years), conditions were either extremely hot or extremely cold, unsuitable for human life. Translation: also bad for skiing.

Park City itself used to be a poor former mining town. In 2013, when I moved here, it was just emerging from a major downturn that followed the 2008 banking crisis; there were literally years in which zero residences were sold within certain ski area developments.

But now, everyone seems to think that skiing here will be possible forever and that spending $4 million or $8 million on a vacation home here is a wise idea, even if developers are building more new units than anyone can count.

My intention isn’t just to talk about Park City. I’m simply seeing this area with fresh eyes today, and am trying to make a larger point about the incorrect ways we view time.

Time exists on a vast scale that dwarfs our individual lives. In the scheme of reality, it simply isn’t important that we buy a vacation house, get promoted, earn money or publish a book. We have trouble grasping the true nature of time because we ignore the true nature of time.

Life has existed on Earth for around 3.8 billion years, but conscious, reflective life (such as humans) emerged only in the very last fraction of Earth's existence. If you believe in Heaven, ask yourself this: was Heaven created less than one million years ago, when our species started to exist?

Or ponder this… there are more stars in the Universe (between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion) than grains of sand on our planet), but if you took 10 drops of water and counted the number of H₂O molecules in those drops, you'd get a number equal to all the stars in the universe. (That last statement is according to NPR back in 2012.)

We don’t understand.

We don’t understand time… or scale… or how we fit into the grand scheme of things.

We don’t understand that “now” does not equal forever… or that forever does not mean 10 or 20 years.

We get so caught up in daily life that we ignore magical and meaningful mysteries that surround us.

It’s the wrong time for us to keep our heads in the sand. Life is not about politics or business or money or houses.

I can’t tell you what life actually is about, because I’m still trying to figure it out (and always will be). I am simply suggesting that you, like me, have probably spent a lot of time looking in the wrong places for answers.