Free Time!

Here we are. One more daylight savings time has arrived. I don’t know about you, but I always get excited when we get that extra hour. It’s almost…well…like Christmas! And then there’s the opposite, when that hour is taken back again…we’re not going talk about how that affects me.

Linear time has become such a tight sergeant. It rules most American lives. Most of us find ourselves trapped in it, unable to find the escape key. How did this happen? The Greeks have two words for time: Kronos and Kairos. Kronos is the type of time that all of us Americans know too well. Kairos is the one that we’ve forgotten. It’s the time that passes without measurement or awareness. It is also, the Modern Greek word for the weather. It is the time from the biblical passage and the Byrds’ song, “Turn, Turn, Turn…” It’s the time to which we refer when we say, “It’s time to make a change in our lives, to settle down, to find that perfect someone.”

I often wonder what it says about a culture that lives within only one type of time, the drill-sergeant type. No wonder Buddhism, presence meditation, Eckhart Tolle, teaching doctors mindfulness meditation and such, have become so mainstream and necessary to our emotional, spiritual and physical survival.

I am reminded of our rat-race every time I step off the plane in the good old U.S. of A. I try to look into the creased haggard faces rushing by. I try to meet someone else’s eyes…almost impossible. (Certainly the opposite experience that I just had in Greece!) For a few moments—because that’s all I have now that I’m back in America—I feel sorry for all of us. And then slowly, insidiously, over the next few hours or days, or—if I’m lucky—weeks, the sympathy disappears and is replaced with a dull nausea.

Okay! You’ve been given an extra precious hour today. How will you spend it? How about remembering Kairos and inviting him/her back into your life!


Check out this post about time: Lost and Found in Linear Time.

Books about Time and Presence: Leslee Keenan's It's About Time
Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now and A New Earth