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I don't know if this could be a future focus for our project (can you say more what that might look like??), but I do think that we considered the notion that our lives "exceed the moment, however wrecking it is" when we tried, last fall, to think with Arlo about the implications of deep time:  "On this time scale, nothing I do matters." In a tectonic, or even an evolutionary, framework, "nothing I do has an effect." Alternatively, might such an understanding give us a distanced perspective, make us less angry, more indifferent to petty human concerns, even bring us to ecstasy?"

I've been working w/ these ideas lately in the class on evolving systems that Paul and I are co-teaching for first-semester students, who offer both responses: feeling alternatively diminished and enlarged by a sense of the world beyond --way, way, WAY beyond!--themselves.