During my workday, if I'm having a hard time moving from a fun, creative task into a deadline-driven administrative one, simply being aware of the fact that I'm moving from kairos to kronos can ease the transition. By consciously inserting myself into one or the other, I can influence the way I experience time. I have found the distinction between kronos and kairos to be very helpful in normal, everyday circumstances. We were once again wrapped in a moment where kronos and kairos kiss, getting our own little glimpse of eternity in a tandem embrace. As Tony and I watched this uncovered treasure-on-tape, we celebrated ten years of marriage in kronos time and were able to relive our wedding through the serendipity of kairos time. On the day when Tony and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary, we discovered that a video of our wedding ceremony existed, and we hadn't even known it! The discovery of this treasure was so powerful, it made me realize the importance of creating time capsules to uncover at surprising moments. Kronos and kairos smooched again on an auspicious day a decade later. A sacred moment, a holy moment, carved out by love's integrity. In welcoming our friends and loved ones, Bill said, "This moment is a time between the times. A longtime family friend who officiated the ceremony, Bill O'Brien, referenced the terms during the ceremony, which was an apt touch, since my husband-to-be was Greek. My first memory of these two Greek words for time is from my wedding day in 2000. Through this simple change in perspective, we begin to see how we too can travel through time, and how we can even connect to eternity, as our words, art, and actions of today can reverberate throughout the universe forever, just as my dad's words are echoing here. By embracing the idea of kairos, we move beyond chronology and begin to view our time and our entire life in nonlinear, expansive terms, opening up to rich opportunities for inspiration. My father passed away several years ago, but these words are a bittersweet reminder that timeless wisdom often extends beyond a chronological life's last breath. In such synchronicity of kronos and kairos lies our deepest consolation and our steepest aspiration." We can deepen our quest and our experiences of numinous time. We can temper our fear and our fixation on sequential time. "We are not helpless to tip the balance in the direction of kairos over kronos. Kairos is time that is energized by the living dream of the future and presents us with unlimited possibility. Kronos devours us with remorseless certainty. Kronos is mechanistic and deterministic, time that is ruled by the dead hand of the past. "Drawing on these ancient mythic images, we can revisit the two kinds of time with deeper understanding. He personified numinous moments of time giving birth to novelty and surprise. He reached out with the other hand to tip those scales, altering the course of fate. He was portrayed as a winged god, dancing on a razor's edge. "By contrast, Kairos was one of the subtlest gods in the Greek pantheon. He devoured his own children to prevent them from replacing him as the supreme god, but his wife saved their last son, Zeus, who eventually overthrew his father's relentless rule of life and death. He was Lord of the Universe, the source of life and death. Kronos, the god of the world and time, was the most important of the Elder Gods. The Greeks represented time with nine different gods, but the main gods of time were Kronos and Kairos. "Like most mysteries of nature and life in the ancient world, these different experiences of time were seen as the manifestations of different gods. Kairos is circular, dancing back and forth, here and there, without beginning or ending, and knows no boundaries. Kairos is a time of festivals and fantasies it cannot be controlled or possessed. Kronos is linear, moving inexorably out of the determinate past toward the determined future, and has no freedom. Kronos is the time of clocks and calendars it can be quantified and measured. "Kronos (or cronos in the English spelling, from which we take our word chronology) is sequential time. Not surprisingly, the Greeks had two words for marking the differences between the experiences of time kronos and kairos. For example, they had three different words for the experience of love eros for possessive love, philia for friendly love, and agape for sacrificial love. Where we use one word to describe a whole range of things, they had the good sense to use different words to mark distinctions in reality and in experience. "As usual, the Greeks were ahead of us in thinking and speaking about such conundrums.
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