It’s About Time!
A few days ago we put 2022 in our rear-view mirror and said hello to 2023. People all around the world celebrated the New Year with parties and pageantry. In Times Square the ball began to drop 60-seconds before midnight, and when it finally got to the bottom the crowd cheered and welcomed in the New Year, with all the hopeful promise that a new beginning brings.
There is something invigorating about turning the calendar to January 1st. I suppose it’s the opportunity for a fresh start that excites us. We hope the Stock Market will rebound from last year’s dismal showing. We hope our health will improve. We hope political rancor will subside. The New Year provides a clean slate that enables us to right some of the wrongs of the previous year.
But then the holidays slide by, back to work we go, and once again we get crushed by a thousand and one demands that gradually push aside our good intentions. There just isn’t enough time to get everything done. And before we know it another year has passed us by, and we find ourselves back to square one, feeling guilty over things left undone. If only we had more time, we say to ourselves, then we would have been able to accomplish more.
What is time anyway? Philosophers world-wide have studied time for centuries but time remains shrouded in mystery. St. Augustine once said that he knows exactly what time is as long as no one asks him, but when someone asks him to explain it, he draws a blank. Some theologians think that heaven is not bound by the dimension of time. In eternity time stands still, similar to how children lose all track of the hour when completely absorbed in play. The Bible hints that time is a rather meaningless category as a thousand years in the heavenly realm is merely a day in God’s reckoning.
Some ancient philosophers surmised that time itself is an illusion because in reality nothing really ever changes. If everything remains basically the same, they theorized, then time doesn’t exist. In other words, time is a human invention that justifies our illusion that life moves forward. Eastern thinkers, on the other hand, conceive of time as an endless wheel of suffering, with repetitive cycles throughout eternity. The goal, then, is to be released from the endless cycle of birth and be joined with the Divine.
Regardless of how we view time one thing is certain: our individual lives have a beginning point and an end point. As we grow older, we move toward that end point. The aging process reminds us that eventually we will die. Slowly, our bodies lose energy, our joints ache, our vision deteriorates, and we may even take medication that helps keep us alive. And, as we age, time passes a lot more quickly! Someone has said that life is like a roll of toilet paper—the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.
Thinking about time can be stressful. There are so many things we need to do each day and there never seems to be enough time. Seldom do we climb into bed at night and feel that we have checked off all the boxes, finished everything we were supposed to do. Then, if you’re like me, you hyper-focus on what didn’t get done and become so fixated on those things, you forget to celebrate what you did accomplish. If there were ten or twenty items on your to-do list, and you finished all but one, that one unfinished task haunts you and you can’t think of anything else but the one thing you left undone. If only there were more time!
The ancient Greeks can teach us something about time that may add some perspective to our lives. They had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos was chronological time, similar to how we understand time today. The passing of days, months, seasons, and the years consisted of chronos time. It was measurable and divided time similar to how we understand time today.
When we say things like, “Don’t waste time,” or “Time is money,” we are referencing chronos time. Chronos time moves inexorably onward and there is nothing we can do to stop it. My life is governed by chronos time as is yours. Our days are numbered, and we only have so much chronos on earth.
But if we think of life only in terms of chronos, we will always be trying to manipulate time, like the fifty-year-old dressing like a twenty-five-year-old. We soon discover, however, it is a losing battle. Chronos reminds us that we are finite creatures, with a limited number of days, and we need to make the best use of the time we have been given. Still, if our world is completely tied to chronos, we will miss out on much of the richness of life.
The second word used by Greeks to denote time was kairos. Kairos implied that time was not merely a chronological passing of minutes, hours and days but was imbued with significance and meaning. Kairos describes those snapshot experiences when we are attentive and consciously present to the world around us. One might say that kairos pauses the progression of chronos or at least slows it down so that we can savor the moment at hand. Some moments in life deserve to be lengthened, prolonged, and we do this by being fully engaged.
We can’t stop time but maybe we can slow it down by being more mindful to the experiences of the present—to listen more attentively to those who are dear to us, to eat our daily bread more consciously, to value everyday as a gift, and to revel in the next breath we draw.
How often I have been with family or friends when my mind was a million miles away. In the company of those closest to me, I found myself thinking about a problem at work or an unfinished task and was not fully engaged with my friends. I missed the kairos moment, a chunk of life never to come my way again.
A meaningful life balances chronos and kairos. Yes, we can’t stop time, but we can cordon off slices of it and preserve them by being completely attentive when those sacred occasions do occur—our daughter’s first piano recital, our spouse’s anniversary, our children’s first day of school and so many other special life experiences. We can add meaning to time by living in the moment and by focusing exclusively on what is before us. Afterwards, when the inevitable chronos has forced us to turn the page, those carved out episodes will be more deeply embedded within us, allowing the memory to be more vivid because we were fully present.
Most of us spend our lives hurrying from one thing to the next. We seldom allow ourselves the time to pause and smell the roses, so to speak. And when we dash at breakneck speed through another year, we fret over all the things we didn’t get done and berate ourselves over resolutions broken. But what if we were to see life through a different lens. Instead of valuing life only in terms of what we finished or failed to complete, maybe we could measure our days and years by the beautiful moments captured in our memory that give meaning to our lives.
Maybe success is not about how much we accomplish but about the relationships we forge, the memories we cherish, and the moments when we put the world on hold by being fully present. It’s about time, don’t you think?
