Scales of Time
The other day I was watching a flycatcher catch insects. From its perch atop a bamboo pole, it repeatedly dove down to the grass with an agile aerial manoeuvre. In flight, its wings took on many fleeting shapes which my eyes could not catch. After scampering rapidly on the ground, it returned to its perch, but it had eaten the prey on its way up. My eyes saw it fly down and return to the perch, but could barely discern what went on in between.
Indeed, there is a limit to the speed at which our eyes and brains distinguish and comprehend events. From childhood we operate on a scale of time commensurate with human anatomical abilities. We learn to value, manage and utilize the time allotted to us. We learn the all-important lesson: there is nothing more valuable in our life than the time we are given on this planet. Time for us has a horizon on the scale of the human life expectancy, around 6-9 decades. Further, we tailor our repetitive activities around the period our planet takes to make a complete rotation on its axis. Finally, gravity – the time it takes for things to fall – helps us fine-tune our scale of time.
But this scale of time can be very different for other forms of life.
For example, the small fly called midge lives only a day or two as an adult. Butterflies have an average life span of two weeks. On the other hand, some of the bristlecone pine trees of North America have been alive for over 5000 years.
Because we have so many daily tasks and hectic schedules, we often forget about these different scales of time. However, when we step out of our daily routines, such as hiking outdoors in nature, we can appreciate the scales of time.
In The Wild Places, a book about spending time in nature, the author Robert MacFarlane mentions this sense of time when he is hiking in a remote valley in Scotland: “... [the valley] kept many different kinds of time, and not all of them were slow....the sudden drop of a raven, the veer of water around a rock, the darts of the damselflies...but it was the great chronologies of [the valley's] making which had worked upon my mind most powerfully.”
The scale of geological time is difficult for us to comprehend. It was during Darwin's era that scientists discovered how incredibly long it had taken for our planet to mature in a geological sense. This revelation had a profound impact on Darwin's thoughts.
One reason photography fascinates me is because it allows me to peek outside the human scale of time. Perhaps the most famous example is Eadward Muybridge's photographic study, around 1872, of horses in motion. Up until then, painters had depicted galloping horses with two feet on the ground, but Muybridge's photographs proved what the eye could not see – that all four hooves of a galloping horse are lifted from the ground during some point of its motion.
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