This started as a short comment to SJW’s recent posts, but got longer the more I got into the Now.
In May of 1997 I moved to DC to follow a girlfriend who was finishing her last year at Georgetown. We had met the summer before while working together at an outdoor experiential education program in NJ (yes, NJ). I had - I thought - just finished my undergraduate credits by writing a thesis on ecological architecture, and was ready to dive into the non-profit sector with gusto.
At this point in my life I was earnestly commited to environmentalism. I got a job working as an “Administrative Assistant” for the Passive Solar Industries Council, or PSIC, and learned a lot about the technical side of passive solar building techniques. I also saw first-hand the alcohol-fueled antics of low-level DC lobbying wags and perfected the art of collating non-recycled paper.
Around September, I called Rutgers to see where my diploma was, and they told me that I still needed three credits to graduate. (Long story amid a long story.) Through a connection at work I enrolled in a fourth-year architecture course on environmentally friendly design at the University of Maryland.
I enjoyed the class immensly, but it also began the process in which my youthful idealism calcified into something more cynical and - well, selfish. While we learned about the relative insulating properties of brick vs. straw bales, we were innundated with dire statistics about global warming, overpopulation, polution, and resource depletion. Bar graphs and pie charts plotted out a miserable future that no well-meaning government policy or well-funded private initiative could reverse.
I passed the course, graduated, broke up with my girlfriend, and came to the realization that I didn’t want to be an “Administrative Assistant” - I wanted to be a musician. I moved to New York, and I began a hand-to-mouth existence in one of the most overcrowded and polluted places on earth. The Land of the Short Here and Now, for sure. Over the years I have somehow managed to retain a few of my superficial hippyisms: Dr. Bronner’s soap, health food store munchies, etc., but by-and-large I am now a New Yorker. I want it fast and I want it now.
It’s only when I leave the City - to the Jersey Shore or Upstate to go camping - that this small pang of loss seeps into my consciousness. I cried in the car last summer when I realized how long it had been since I saw the late afternoon light on the hardwood trees in Monmouth County. Someday I hope that I can find a little place to live, some respite where I can listen to the crickets with the windows open. I will be getting married soon and for the first time planning on raising a family. Bringing people into this f’ed up world has always presented an existential problem for me, but I’ll work it out somehow. I’ve got good help. The future looks worse than ever, really, but I find strange solace in geological time. We’re all going around and around together, whether in this body or another. Just like little hampsters in the wheel of the Short Now, never knowing that the Really Long Now is on the other side of the glass. . .
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i feel your pain rich.
i took a few astronomy courses and found them to be fascinating. the origin of stars and planets and expanding space captivated my interest. i posed a question during one class that i remember well. it was during an earth discussion. it went kind of like this: “at what point will our(human) actions be irreversable with respect to the survival of life on earth? will the next ice age help to erase some of our mistakes?”
the prof said matter of factly, ” do not assume that humans are so powerful that they can erradicate life on earth. humans will and can do significant damage to some species here and now but inevitably can hurt mostly themselves in the long run. when humans are no longer around this planet will still be harboring life of some kind and orbiting the sun just as it has for millions of years, until of course the sun blows up and burns up planet earth like a piece of lint in a fire.”
so dont think too “long”, or the result is the lack of existence.
and dont think too short, or the result is leaving those behind us with much less than we have been afforded by our forefathers.
lets call this happy medium ” the not so long or short now”
Agreed.