Time concepts
Leaning on the Greeks
Why Time Rebels? I admit I am reaching for something. It’s a very different way of making decisions about living that affects the quality of life itself and my impact. It feels like it’s an approach that’s helping me gain clarity on how to show up in the world.
The challenge now is developing my practice of Time Rebelling whilst trying to articulate it better. If I can do that, it will be an idea that speaks to others too.
One of the problems of thinking and writing about time is that you can soon end up in the weeds.
Warning: this might be one of those posts.
To quote me from 11 years ago:
‘I feel the measurement of time by clocks and a Pope’s calendar as a deep constriction on my soul. I cannot deny the passing of “time”, the moon waxes and wanes, the tides rise and fall, the seasons change, night follows day and so on but surely the word time is too limited to encapsulate all these concepts?’
Helpful to this thinking is the ancient Greeks, who divided time into two concepts. One of these was chronos. This was understood as the sequential, linear time we measure with our clocks and calendars. Arguably that’s the only time we might recognise now as the time we live and work by.
Even if we agree chronos is the type of time most of us are bound to live our lives by, we are all aware that there are other types of time to experience. This is when time does something different from the usual. The way we experience time passing in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep, when your child is ill, or someone is dying. The way time seems to hang in the air when we travel.
Those experiences bring us closer to another type of time. It’s the second concept that the Greeks described as kairos. This concept cannot be defined exactly by one word in English. Kairos is to do with those moments that we experience only in the now, without measurement. Chronos is defined as quantitative, kairos is qualitative.
Kairos is something to not merely note as the movement of a clock, but as something to participate in.
Let me give a few examples. I experience kairos when I look at certain paintings, listen to music, or stand under a tree and look up at the sky. I often have this experience when I write.
Sometimes the opportunity offered to humans through participating in this kind of time, not just marking it off, changes the course of history. Even if that is not an option for me or you today… kairos still offers each of us a window to look through now and then to transcend the limitations of the clockface.
This description of kairos moments is personal to me. Everyone will have their moments they could describe as kairos.
I am curious.
What are yours?
