The time of your life

In keeping with the idea that you might be living your life too fast, I think I should say something about time.

The Greeks have two words for the concept of time. The first is the word 'Kronos'. This refers to what we usually understand by our word 'time' - the time-of-day type of time. It is the root of the word Chronometer (a time meter), chronicle, chronology and the lovely dendro-chronology, (finding out the age of a tree by counting its rings).

The second word they have is 'Kairos'. This also means time, but is a more emotional concept. It means 'the right time', or 'the appropriate time'. There are many 'right times' which occur in our lives. Loaves are cooked and wine is ready at the 'right time'. There is a right time to propose marriage and crops are ripe at the 'right time'. As soon as we grasp this slower beat to life we can see it in all sorts of places. We see it when things work to their own internal rhythm and pace and come to fruition when they are ready.

Of course we can hurry things along and we might also delay them, but then they would lose their organic integrity. Pieces of a system all have their own separate functions. In a natural system they don't tend go too fast or too slowly because various feedback and regulation processes govern their interplay. There are checks and balances. There are pauses in the system for a reason, whether we know what those reasons are or not. The system has evolved. It may have taken us many years to develop ourselves in order, like an artist, to let our skills flow in our work, and it has taken Nature millions of years to develop the living complexity we see all around us.

This is not to say that we live in a pre-ordained world and that everything natural beats to just one rhythm. Natural things all have their own rhythm of birth, growth, maturity and death. Rhythms may be similar or very different. Looking for, and respecting, those rhythms of Kairos wherever we find them will help us feel both some of the similarities in the living things and some of their differences. Seeing both the similarities and differences helps awaken us to the wonder of diversity in the natural world. And knowing they all fit into a natural wholeness helps produce a feeling of connectedness in us, knowing that we, too, have our own natural rhythm.