Time is only experienced by the events which occur within it

I am watching Terence McKenna’s Final Interview on YouTube and when he states that time is speeding up, the interviewer asks what he means, since the time we keep is the same as ever, and it doesn’t seem to be changing.

McKenna answers with a question:

Which lasts longer? A million years in which nothing happens or ten seconds with fifty thousand events crammed into it? In other words really, time is only experienced by the events which occur within it.

As I listen to McKenna, I imagine, as I often do, how a tree might experience the changes around it if time were sped up. I see tree roots lifting a sidewalk and imagine taking a photo every day, for years, then speeding up the footage. What would it look like? A tree kicking a stone away?

In The Web of Meaning, Jeremy Lent describes mountains as waves that move extremely slowly from our point of view. How would mountains perceive the thousands of trees growing and dying on their slopes as they inch toward their destination?

Trees can move. They can change their place over generations. In Ways of Being, James Bridle describes how as the climate changes, forests have been observed moving higher and higher up mountain slopes, toward more favorable climates. From a mountain’s perspective, this must happen in the blink of an eye.

There’s a game called 400 Years, by indie developer Scriptwelder, in which you play as a stone monument. You can choose to sit still and let time pass: the sun rises and sets in fast-forward, years go by, and you wait for a winter cold enough to freeze the river so you can cross. It reminds me of Åsa Lind’s book The Sandwolf, where the Sandwolf tells Zackarina that being a stone isn’t boring at all: you can travel the world being a stone.

I once met a big boulder that was on such a journey. It was sitting in a field beside a friend’s house, just north of Berlin. It came a long way from up north, likely carried by a glacier during the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago. The villagers cherished it. I believe it’s still there.

Let’s shift perspective for a moment and think about beings that experience time much faster than we do. I am thinking about computers. They do in seconds what we can do in years. Imagine how we look to Claude or ChatGPT. Are we trees to our computers?