I left work early on Friday, a backlog of extra hours allowing me to cut my day short. I took a drive from my own small town in Central Pennsylvania to another small town about half an hour south immediately afterwards; whether going north or south, I always love the drive from where I am, and it was especially wonderful this time. As you leave the exit behind, the forests stand covering the hills in the distance. The leaves are finally starting to turn, and I found myself slowing a bit to get a better look at a few spectacularly brilliant pieces of foliage. Most of the trees are still green, the daytime temperatures enough to fool them into thinking that it is still summer. A small number are already bursting into brilliant reds, yellows and oranges, and even a few deep purples.
The beginning of autumn is one of my favorite times of the year. I do enjoy the other seasons, but autumn has its own special joys. The burning heat of summer is mostly gone, but it is still warm enough to be pleasant outside. Nearly every morning now I wake up to a thick hanging fog, courtesy of the nearby river and the cold overnight air. It's a time for extra bedding, hot chocolate, a special crispness in the air, and for some reason my coffee seems to taste better in the autumn than it does in the rest of the year. As the nights grow colder and darker, there is a sense of finality, that at last we're moving towards the end of another year.
The drive in this part of the state is especially interesting to me due to the cuts of rock made when the road was constructed. As an outgrowth of my love of paleontology, I also love to look at rocks, seeing the different bands and how the earth has lifted and distorted many of them. My mind boggles at the thought of the time that it took to lay down those sedimentary layers and push them back up once more. The fall leaves are a nice contrast to that; the leaves remind us that another year is passing. The cuts of rock remind us how little a single year is the course of our planet. A year can mean everything to us, with our small spans of life. So much can change for a human being in a single year, but a year is an infinitesimally small period compared with the billions of years of Earth's history.
The juxtaposition of these two, the fall leaves and the rock layers, reminded me that whatever problems we have are quite small when we think about the sheer scale of all of it, the depth of geologic time and the vastness of the universe. This isn't to be dismissive, to assert that we ourselves don't have problems. No, the problems we have in our lives are quite real, and can cause us real pain. But viewing something like the towering rock layers, representing millions of years of life on Earth does help bring a little bit of perspective. We may have problems, but thinking about the world in which we inhabit can help to put many of them into their proper proportion.
Comments
Post a Comment