Kairos vs. Chronos Time (and how we measure the passing of our lives)
We’ve all heard some version of that adage, “time flies when you’re having fun.” Or we’ve read about “flow state” and how time seems to slow way down (or speed way up) when we’re in the midst of it.
Time, it turns out, doesn’t always feel particularly consistent.
Last week, following several requests from our daughter to play catch, our family grabbed our gloves and softballs and headed to a local park.
While Heather and our youngest ran over to the playground for a good game of Sea Monster (a lovely iteration of Lava Monster in which Heather enjoyed imaginatively becoming a crab with tentacles that went “rarararar”), our daughter and I practiced throwing, catching, taking ground-balls, and hitting for awhile. There was plenty of laughter and wiggling while we ran around having fun under the thick layer of PNW clouds.
It was glorious – and time seemed to disappear completely.
Our society is well-conditioned to think of the passing of time as linear and relentless, a timeline moving us forward through seconds, minutes, hours, and days. And while this is helpful for planning and calendaring, this way of thinking about time doesn’t seem to match our experience of time in these beautiful moments of near-timelessness.
The ancient Greeks referred to the first kind of time – linear, sequential, and measured – as chronos. Similar to a clock or a calendar, chronos time just keeps chugging along.
But they had another view of time, which they referred to as kairos. Rather than measuring the quantity of time or the passage of it, kairos time refers to the deep quality or texture of a moment: the weight a moment has in relation to the next.
For example, the hours I spent in the hospital room with my grandpa just following his death was experienced as kairos time. The afternoon Heather and I got engaged while hiking on Mount Rainier was experienced as kairos time. That half-hour or so out on the field playing softball with our daughter was experienced as kairos time.
In each of these moments, there was weight and texture and depth, a quality of relationship and resonance, and even a bit of awe.
(In contrast, driving to the field that day was very much experienced as chronos time, the GPS in my head giving me an expected ETA and my mind resting comfortably on autopilot.)
We most often experience these kairos moments in the midst of:
Love
Death
Changes
Suffering
Turning points
Meaning-making work
Deep connection with nature
Time flows differently in these kinds of moments – our clocks and calendars cease being the standard by which we measure the passing of our lives.
