My last section of one of my classes met outside, on the grass and in the sun. We weren’t learning any new material, but were reviewing and talking about what things in the class we’d remember and take away with us. As the teaching fellow talked for a bit about the format of the final exam, my mind wandered and I thought about Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” a collection of poems that starts out as the narrator examines individual blades of grass that come together to form a larger sea of green. The poems in the anthology move from this particular instance of reckoning to larger observations of Americans and people as a whole. Basically, Whitman acknowledges the beauty of the smaller things in life (blades of grass) and builds up to put many of these small things together.
This in itself is a fairly abstract concept, but I thought about how we we can apply this idea of building larger things from small units, to the idea of time. Classical Hindu cosmology views time in terms of the gods Brahma and Vishnu, with Vishnu reclining in the cosmic sea, and Brahma sitting upon a lotus that stems from Vishnu’s navel. Time is measured in various terms: a nimesha is an atom of time, described by the analogy of a blink of an eye, whereas a kalpa is a large amount of time - described as the amount of time it takes for a large mountain, the size of Mt. Everest, to be eroded if a bird were to sweep across the top with a silk scarf once a day. One day for Brahma is one kalpa.
There are even more units of time and outlined eras — both infinitesimal and infinitely large — that I won’t go into; but I found it interesting that the Hindu concept of time acknowledges both the significance and insignificance of how we perceive time. A nimesha can be a pivotal moment in someone’s life, while our entire lifespan can be construed as a less than significant nimesha for Brahma, or in the larger scope of the universe. While I don’t think we can deem insignificant and cast away the small events and emotions of each day, I do think a healthy balance of acknowledging both the small things in our lives (or Whitman’s blades of grass) and the larger reality (what all these small units come together to form) is essential to both appreciating life and living it fruitfully. After all, during trying times, it’s comforting to know that time passes and life continues.
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