The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos, as I learned (or possibly re-learned) at my niece’s graduation yesterday morning. As I sat partially listening to the speaker, I too reflected a bit on time. Chronos is quantitative, measurable time –seconds, minutes, hours, days. It marches on with the enthusiasm of a greying, bent Father Time. It is unrelenting and not terribly imaginative. Chronos is mostly good for making you feel old.
Kairos, on the other hand, delivers a qualitative sense of time. It measures moments, not seconds. It refers to the right moment, the opportune moment. Dare I say, the perfect moment. Assessing this measure of time requires us to make a mental shift. Instead of looking at our time as grains of sand slipping through an hourglass, we could view our time as opportunities flying by. Rather than experiencing seconds wasting away, we realize that not every second holds the same worth. Some are better than others.
In fact, the most meaningful moment to be experienced is right now.
Marking this milestone for my niece made me think about my own high school graduation. It was uneventful, as I recall. Life seemed, at that time, like a brand new day set to begin, as though I was at the dawn of something great and unknown. I was so sure it would all unfold just as I wished. I can’t remember what I specifically dreamt of, but I was preoccupied with getting out of “here” and on to the new phase…you know that mystical time or place when life is really going to begin. There was nothing particularly wrong where I lived or went to school but I was so damn sure that there was something so much better just over the horizon. And I was in such a hurry to get on with it.
As I sat watching my niece’s classmates, I could barely recall what I was thinking or feeling back then, but I do know that I didn’t have any appreciation for being right there, right then. No one asked me for my advice, though I sometimes offer it anyway. And I don’t have anything significant to offer other than the truths I’ve learned the hard way.
I wish I could tell my eighteen year old self to slow down a little…to just savor the moment. But I didn’t know how to do that then and the truth is I wouldn’t have listened anyway. Hell, sometimes I forget how to do it now and start wishing my life away … when this happens, after that event, everything will be back to normal after x, y or z. When I’m living in the future or the past, I’m squandering my most precious moment in time with is right now.
So for today I’ll ignore the slow march of chronos and revel in my kairos when I can.
Hope you can too.
Boonedoggler 