There is a famous, possibly apocryphal story of Hutton coming at the end of a beach upon a cliff face with, above eye level, thousands of layers of sedimentary strata, with a thin layer of gravel at eye level, and then to left and right thousands more layers arrayed vertically. When he grasped how much time it would have taken to lay down the bottom layers, tip them up and over 90 degrees, and then erode them down to the gravel layer, and finally lay the hundreds more strata on top, his legs went out under him and he plopped onto the beach.
A really engaging introduction to geology and deep time is "Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth", by Marcia Bjornerud,
https://bookshop.org/books/reading-the-rocks-the-autobiograp...