Geological time is so hard to comprehend. There is a term called ‘deep time’.
James Hutton, a Scotish geologist, is attributed with the concept of deep time. He and his mathematician friend, John Playfair (great name) were looking at some (very interesting) rock in 1788. Playfair later commented*:
The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.
Sometimes I feel giddy at the slow pace of change in our house. Careful and sometimes exasperated parents perform supportive acts that often result in barely perceptible change.
New activities, new foods… a lot of effort is put into respectfully introducing and embedding something different. A year passes. And another. We are facing our own kind of deep time. It is perhaps unthinkable to parents of neurotypical children, to teachers, to most people in public services we deal with. There are exceptions: the nutritionist I met with, she understood.
We do live with our own sort of deep time. I don’t fully understand it, you can’t understand someone else’s mind. But you don’t have to, you just keep learning to live with other people.
My daughter loves the Clarice Bean books (so do I). Clarice Bean has worries^:
I have made a list of them in my notebook - it’s a notebook for worst worries - because people say things aren’t so bad if you make a list.
And then you can tick things off when they are solved. So far I haven’t ticked anything off.
I empathise.
Clarice struggles with infinity (it is her number 1 worst worry). But by the end of the book she’s coming to terms with it, that perhaps infinity helps you remember “things in the world aren’t as big as you think they are - not compared to infinity anyway”+.
* John Playfair quoted in Edinburgh Geological Society; Hutton’s Unconformity https://www.edinburghgeolsoc.org/edinburghs-geology/huttons-unconformity/ accessed 24 January 2020
^ Lauren Child, Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now. London, Orchard Books 2006, p 7
+ Lauren Child, Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now. London, Orchard Books 2006, p 252