by Jessie Carson
“I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.” ~ Danny Hillis
How would you live your life if you took the next 10,000 years into account? If you geared your actions to benefit whoever or whatever might be around at that time? We don’t know what everything will be like in 10,000 years. We don’t know how we will travel, communicate, or if the human race or this planet will even be around. But, for this essay, let’s be hopeful and say that the world will be around and there will be living beings on it, all of them our descendants in some way. How would we make choices today, knowing that we will be the ancestors one day? What would we make if we wanted it to last and be of benefit 10,000 years from now?
We are often plagued by the short-term decisions we have made in our life. Overindulgence of a meal we had earlier in the day? That daily choice to place importance on money over our time with people we love and our mental well-being? Regretted words that flew out of our mouth unnecessarily in an uncontrolled fit? That all said, we have created structures that don’t make long-term beneficial decisions easy. We’ve crafted things that we don’t quite know what to do with when we’re done with it. The plastic bag, for example. We’ve invented things that we let be in control of our attention and we might spend hours a day facing a screen rather than another person or ourselves. Dopamine, the chemical that induces wanting and wanting more and wanting now, increases when our phone dings, even if that ding is telling us that our phone bill has arrived. We programed it this way.
We might think it’s easier to make choices that do harm rather than create great benefit. This is why I was delighted to come across a clock being built that is designed to keep ticking for 10,000 years. It was dreamed up by a team of inventors, including Danny Hillis.
“There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before.”
This is the vision that Hillis had prior to engineering this clock. He wanted to build a clock that would last at least as long as the human race has been around on this planet. This is hope. Not the kind of hope that lifts us off our feet, is at risk of popping and always remains just out of reach. This is embodied and engaged hope.
Living an engaged and well-meaning life knowing that we will never experience the full fruition of our actions is a helpful way to approach a spiritual practice. The Buddha said that enlightenment can take somewhere between a lifetime to an incalculable number of eons. An eon is much more than 10,000. So what? What does that mean when we approach our practice? I have found that considering this longer view of time can help to be a little less self-centred and induce less yearning for results. Many things that Buddhism teaches can help to blow apart our short-term fixed mindset in this way, if we let it. I don’t mean to sound like a pessimist here, but knowing that I will probably not reach enlightenment in this lifetime or any foreseeable lifetime lightens the load my practice.
The funny thing is, even though I probably won’t reach an end to all of my worldly problems any time soon, I’m still going to practice. And, it becomes less and less likely that I trust anything that promises a quick fix.
The 10,000 year clock’s melodies are composed by Brian Eno, a musician who coined the term ‘ambient music’ but can barely be categorized that way and whose accolades are too many to list here. He designed the chimes so that the clock gives a different sound each time it rings. In this sense, it has escaped the numbing habit and affect of repeating itself.
So, what kind of time does this clock measure and tick by? My inability to come up with a simple answer for this is what is so lovely about it. Although the clock is able to run for 10,000 years on its own, it needs visitors in order to continue to ring its chimes and display the correct time. It needs the earth to keep rotating around the sun and it needs night time to tell it when a day has passed.
No matter how long we live or what we choose to leave behind, we need the support and presence of others. Just as those who might be around hundreds or thousands of years from now are relying on how we choose to live our life today.
If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish? The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?” ~ The Long Now