The sunset today was exceptional.
Always take time to praise a bit of nature errday. Even if for 5 seconds (sometimes i admire trees i’m driving past and miss my turning) or even better, a good 10 minutes.
The concept of time has been toying in my mind this week.
Well, it’s something i’ve had whirl around my head, but not actually had time to think about. (To have) the time to think about time… haha. Ok i have a lot of things i’m ‘supposed’ to blog about, but like Claudia reminded me last week – my best posts were the unplanned ones where i just blabber. So i plan to blabber more.
Ok so back to time. I feel like i go through bouts of pondering on certain subjects for a phase, sometimes they last weeks, sometimes months. I went through my existentialism phase, then spirituality, personal development, entrepreneurial… last year i couldn’t stop thinking about the methane gases + the meat industry and the eventual end of our planet. Yeah super cheerful XD Then i thought a lot about consumerism and how much does a human actually need, the waste we produce, the advertising that makes us all belief we need/want this and that and everything. Then about the energy of the things around us, how they take up space/weigh us down (i obviously read Marie Kondo’s book). Then end of last year i started thinking about time after a convo i had about the Roman calendar.
See, the calendar as we follow it teaches us to divide our time by days, months, years, and so on, so we can measure time and pinpoint events. We live according to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and so forth. So we are somewhat scheduling our physical brains and bodies to FOLLOW this system, week in and week out. Day in and day out. Year after year.
After seeing how some people live through my travels, not everyone follows this schedule like most urbanites. Some people live according to what they feel like doing on certain days. And other people follow the days of the week to get specific things done i.e. accounts on Thursdays, communication (meetings, phonecalls) on Tuesdays – probably according to some energy chart or I-Ching they follow. I tried that concept for awhile and felt it was efficient in the sense that by focusing on a type of task for long periods of time, one didn’t waste energy shifting focus. Your energy could flow in a linear direction. Think of it like a car being made to drive all over the place in various twists and turns vs. a car driving on a straight highway.
Then my concept of time got twisted even deeper after i experienced that ancestral medicine ceremony i went for (which i’ll story tell another day). My experience in my consciousness lasted what felt like 8-10 seconds, but in this reality, i was actually unconscious for 10-15 minutes. It fascinated me cos i knew where i went, what i saw and what i felt. But time compressed and pretty much summed up my deepest belief in time anyway – that it can bend and stretch way beyond our comprehension.
Some time last year, i started experimenting with the way i live my time on a daily basis. We all typically follow a schedule that is deemed appropriate for humans to follow = eat at certain times, work, rest, play, etc. I measured how many days i could continuously work for before i burnt out. I measured how i FELT when i separated my work into blocks of time according to the most opportune time i could complete them. I scheduled my activities based on appropriate/regular timing for weeks, then threw all that up in the air by completing all my tasks for the day by going with when i felt was the best time to do so. Same with days – there were some weekdays i just felt like i didn’t want to work, but some weekends i felt inspired to. So i went with it and it felt really good. My body feels more at ease. (Of course, i have the liberty to do so cos i don’t have to punch in to work and i don’t have children.)
Last weekend i was enlightened to the concept of Kairos:
Kairos (καιρός) is an Ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment. The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (χρόνος) and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a period or season, a moment of indeterminate time in which an event of significance happens. What is happening when referring to kairos depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.
In Onians’ 1951 etymological studies of the word, he traces the primary root back to the ancient Greek association with both archery and weaving. In archery, kairos denotes the moment in which an arrow may be fired with sufficient force to penetrate a target. In weaving, kairos denotes the moment in which the shuttle could be passed through threads on the loom. [source]
The whole week i’ve been thinking of kairos and chronos. At first i was like, i’m all for kairos! I’m a believer of things happening intuitively or at its strongest most opportune time! But after further reading, even the masters of schools of thought couldn’t agree on the definition of kairos, so i shrugged it off with, “Everyone’s brain and concept of reality is different anyway!”
And currently, mulling on the co-existence of consciously implementing kairos and chronos seamlessly into one’s life…
Or maybe it already does and i’m just overthinking it. I mean, i know both concepts are entirely different (quantitative vs. qualitative) but i feel that even the most minute occurrence could fall under the fate of- being timed, or given force at the right time.
Time to stop this before i fall further down the rabbit hole.
The end.
