Traveling Between Time Zones

Adjusting takes more than a good night’s rest.

The Greeks have two words for time. Chronos and Kairos.

The former is calendar time, clock time– measurable in seconds, minutes, hours, decades– centuries. It is quantifiable. Predictable.

Kairos is qualitative. It measures moments. How long or short is not really the point. Good or bad–not the point. Kairos can be a small or large moment. Personal or cultural.

Whatever the circumstances, one quality makes Kairos unique.

Meaning. It is saturated in meaning.

9/11 for anyone living in NYC, and many not, was Kairos. The birth of both our sons. The first time I kissed my husband outside Grand Central Station. The ferry ride coming home from Nantucket to see my mom before she died– all Kairos.

There are world events, family events and personal events.

What makes for Kairos is not what happens, but the feelings that surround it.

It’s not the external circumstances that matter, but rather the intimate, emotional context we give it, the acute awareness we have while in it.

I have several friends and family who have or will be taking their child to college for the first time. We are thankfully far from this event, but it mirrors many smaller letting-go’s we’ve had to do along the way.

I wrote a lyric many years ago after Finn stopped breast-feeding that describes this:

I grew a chamber in my heart to hold you

and a thousand arms to slowly set you free.

All endings, no matter how small, can feel big.

But the college drop-off is unarguably a big one.

In that odd way time has of stretching and collapsing on itself, the beginning seems so long and seemingly infinite and the end so uncompromisingly abrupt and oblique.

It embodies a highly charged intersection of time zones.

An explosive firework of memory– eighteen years of individual moments lit up across the sky in a finale of Independence Day brilliance.

This wild display of Kairos crashes into the syrupy meandering of childhood– the comforting embrace of seemingly infinite Chronos.

Time is everywhere, everything.

And then, the quiet.

I haven’t done this yet, but certain sadnesses telegraph more than individual loss.

Like death out there reminds us to re-engage with life right here, I am reminded, for however long, to walk, not run.

Taste, not devour.

Choose to experience, over getting through.

To see time, not as our enemy, but our closest, dearest friend.