Steven Spielberg's new documentary The Dinosaurs traces their entire evolutionary arc. The iconic T-rex and Triceratops everyone knows, but also the earlier versions, the strange in-between forms, the constant changes. You see how they went through one catastrophe after another, adapting each time, slowly improving and becoming something else.

What stands out to me is the scale of time. These transformations didn’t happen overnight. They took hundreds of millions of years. The dinosaurs we recognize are results of a process that had been unfolding for an almost incomprehensible length of time.

And then you compare that to us.

Humans have been around for what is essentially a blink. A few hundred thousand years, maybe less depending on how you measure it. Civilization is even shorter. Compared to the time dinosaurs dominated the planet, we barely register. It shifts something in how you see things. All the urgency, all the weight we give to our moment, starts to feel a bit misplaced.

There’s a line of thought in the yogi teachings that fits surprisingly well with this. In Gnani Yoga, Yogi Ramacharaka explains that evolution follows fixed laws and unfolds gradually, in ordered stages. Nothing is rushed. Each phase builds on the previous one, over spans of time far beyond human perception.

From that perspective, the slowness is the point. Nature is not trying to get anywhere quickly. It is unfolding.

And we are inside that same process, even if we experience time in a completely different way. We compress everything into years, deadlines, lifetimes. But zoom out far enough, and it becomes clear that we are just a very recent expression of something that has been moving forward for hundreds of millions of years.

It doesn’t make life meaningless. If anything, it reframes it. The pressure to rush, to force outcomes, to feel like everything has to happen now, starts to lose its grip when you see the scale we are actually part of.