In truth, timefulness isn’t a word I’m familiar with. Mindfulness, yes. Sometimes excessively tacked on to everything from meditation to gift packages to retreats. But timefulness is new to me, and possibly to many others. If you google it or its variant ‘timeful’ you’re greeted with results for a technology company in Mountain View, California and a to-do list app acquired by Google in 2015. But American geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s word refers to none of these. In Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, we learn that, for her, timefulness means to become acutely aware of how the world is made by – indeed, made of – time.

A tricky thing, she admits, for a chronophobic species like us, who cast time as the enemy and do everything to deny its passage: Botox, dermal fillers, plastic surgery, anti-ageing creams. But even this type of time denial, rooted in a very human combination of vanity and existential dread, is more forgivable, Bjornerud points out, than other more toxic varieties that work with this mostly benign kind to create a pervasive, stubborn and dangerous “temporal illiteracy”. By this she means the obliviousness with which many of us live our lives on our planet without knowing anything more than the most superficial highlights of its long history. We’ve heard of dinosaurs, and perhaps Pangaea or tectonic plates, but learn little of the durations and happenings of the great chapters in Earth’s past.

In ‘A Call for Timefulness’, the chapter that opens the book, we are reminded, poignantly, powerfully, that to disacknowledge time, to ignore how it is intrinsic to the shaping of our Earth, untethers us from deep geological history. We are at this point in our human history because we have forgotten, wilfully, that we are, above all else, earthlings, shaped by the Earth’s rocky logic. We are detached from our surroundings, speaking distantly of our “relationship with Nature”. In fact, most of us behave like “bad tourists”, Bjornerud accuses, enjoying the planet’s amenities, ransacking its bounty, without ever having noticed that it has its own ancient language and customs.

To be in timefulness is the very opposite of this, and the rest of this slim yet compelling book offers us ways to build awareness of the rich natural history that envelops us, and a sense that we too live in geologic time and are part of a continuum from the planet’s past into its future. Bjornerud’s first book, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth, offered deep and detailed focus on the continuously unfolding history of the Earth, at times turning more technical than I could follow, but Timefulness sits lighter in language and particularities. Bjornerud is more storyteller here, as well as an astute historian of her own discipline.

What struck me most was Bjornerud’s observation of the terrible ramifications to “temporal illiteracy”. All is short-term. As a geologist, Bjornerud contends with Young Earthers, creationists and apocalypticists, but as frustrating as they might be, she admits, more pervasive and corrosive is the time denial that is invisibly woven into the infrastructure of our society, from economic credo that insists on constant growth to populist short-term-thinking politics, from biennial budget cycles to last-minute stop-gap spending measures. And at a moment when the need for long-range vision grows ever more imperative, our attention spans are shrinking as we tend to reels, texts and tweets within an endless insistent Now.

But the book does end with hope: a heartful gathering within its last chapter of ‘deep time’ thinkers, artists and organisations to help guide us into becoming polytemporal beings – Katie Paterson’s Future Library, The Long Now Foundation, Daniel Hillis’s 10,000 Year Clock and Rachel Sussman’s photos of The Oldest Living Things in the World, among many others. The strength of Timefulness lies in this: the clear laying out of a complex, pressing issue and the offering of a solution that lies in connection of all kinds – geology and philosophy, landscapes within and without, stonescape and us.

Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud. Princetown University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780691181202

Janice Pariat is a storyteller of British, Portuguese and Indigenous Khasi origins. Her most recent work, Everything the Light Touches, has won four fiction awards and was listed as a New Yorker Best Book of 2022. She teaches creative writing at Ashoka University in India and lives in Shillong, Meghalaya with a cat of many names.