Our sense of time is a slippery thing… shrinking or expanding depending upon our mood or the season of our lives. For the past two months, I’ve been thinking of the strange passage of time as ‘coronavirus time’, where some days stretch out forever, and weeks pass in the blink of an eye.
The ancient Greeks used two different words to describe time: Kronos and Kairos. Kronos (or Chronos) is the time of the clock and the calendar. Sequential time, ordered and arranged to suit our parsing of the days, weeks, and months. Kairos is expansive time, without boundaries or borders, and can be neither harnessed or controlled.
The Greeks depicted Kairos as a winged god, balancing the scales of fate in his hand. How little it takes, with Kairos in charge for things to tip one way, or the other.
Perhaps what we need now, as we anxiously await what the future will bring, is more Kairos time… Time that is outside time. Time that resists our attempts to control and corral it. Time that ignores our desire for the clock and the calendar to shepherd us into the fog of the future.
For the future will arrive in its own mysterious time… whether we’re ready or not.
