Go ahead, ask me. Ask me the name of the girl who sat in front of me the entire year I spent in sixth grade multiple decades ago.
Couldn’t tell you!
Want to know what I was doing this time last year? So would I.
I had dinner last night and I would tell you what it was if I could remember.
My point is not to demonstrate a poor, fading memory rather than to introduce the idea that time, specifically “a long time ago,” is relative.
I was pondering this remarkably mundane insight as I wandered through a parking garage looking for a car I had parked less than two hours before. Was it on level 3a or 3b? Next to the black Escalade or the blue Tahoe?
(It was actually level 2, parked between a wall and a dark minivan. I think).
When I first heard a report stating that archeologists found evidence in San Diego suggesting humans had been in this part of the globe 130,000 years ago I thought, “Wow, that was a really long time ago.” The report went on to say that it had previously been believed that humans arrived on this patch of dirt only 25,000 or so years ago.
Again, “Wow, that’s a long time ago.”
But as I struggle to remember who won the 2002 World Cup, who won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2015 or how long ago Chula Vista marked the implosion of the South Bay power plant as the beginning of the city’s new and redeveloped bayfront, the conclusion I reach is that time is relative.
There was a time when I was young — probably in the sixth grade seated behind the nameless girl in Mrs. Whatshername’s class — that I thought tomorrow was a long way off.
Now more than 30 years later tomorrow arrives faster than I want — unless it’s a holiday weekend, of course — and more often than not yesterday feels like ages ago.
So when I read stories about time lines having to be recalibrated because evidence suggests humans were walking this neighborhood one hundred, not tens, of thousands of years ago, I process the information with a mix of awe and indifference.
From a distance the new theory suggests a massive block of time. It refers to a period, obviously, long before cities and states and countries as we know them. Then again, so does anything 1,000 years ago. Or 500 years ago.
But scientists and experts will tell you even that block of years is miniscule when considered against the dawn of our mankind (about 200,000 years ago) or the age of the Earth — billions of years.
One hundred thirty thousand years. Just as hard for me to fathom as last year. In the end it’s all the same, and it all passes quickly.
