The Dance of Chronos and Kairos

Time feels fractured.

Not in a bad way. 

All’s well, but strange.

An hour’s work yields the fruit of three, yet the oven’s clock only changes from 12 to 1.

A month disappears in a cat’s slow blink. Two hours in the trees is eternal.

The weeks layer atop each other, like leaves returning to the earth.

Three hours of singing vanishes like a twenty minute meditation.

I close my eyes, inhaling the sweet cedar air. 

I steady myself when the trees whisper:

Chronos isn’t the only form of time.

There is also Kairos.

———

Chronos is linear time. The world’s default setting.

Kairos is embodied time, musical time, forest time, mycelial time. 

The kind of time where nothing ever seems to happen, then everything unfolds at once. Kairos is how time moves when you’re in a flow state; and the fertile, watered ground where the ‘overnight success’ bursts into bloom.

———

I’ve been here before, I swear. Between being raised by an island and the sport of hockey, I knew of Kairos long before the years spent stuck in linear time.

A gift I wasn’t ready to receive. 

A gift I missed like a shadow in the dark.

A gift I’ve finally found and opened.

———

You’ve surely experienced the painful plod time slows down to when you want something to end… and the amazement of how time flies when you’re having fun.

This is the Dance of Chronos and Kairos, of contraction and expansion.

But delightful and seductive as Kairos is, one cannot always hold those hands.

Airports, for example, operate on linear time. 

So unless you want to probably miss your flight, you do too.

Kairos is for when you can expand yourself into the experience of whatever you’re doing: walking, writing, sportsing, painting, singing, lifting, climbing, studying.

Chronos is for when you need to be somewhere, often at or around a specific time., 

With love from the forest,

~ Alexander