In , a group of black South African theologians wrote a response to recent crackdowns by the Apartheid government. It was called The Kairos Document , and it began "The time has come.
The moment of truth has arrived. But kairos need not be as dramatic as that. It can be a small moment in one person's life that is ripe, and full, and perfect. If someone promises perfection they're either selling something or deluding themselves, right? But to deny the existence of perfection is to deny the evidence of our own lives. In the book version of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, Tyler Durden spends hours dragging driftwood logs into position on a lonely beach.
And the most you can expect from a moment is that it be perfect. It's hard to pin down an example, but I'll try:. Some years ago I was wandering through Sydney's Hyde Park.
The Night Noodle Markets were on, and workers streamed out of their offices and into the approaching dusk. Red lanterns were strung between the trees and the stalls. The sharp sweet scent of a hundred different kinds of noodles filled the air. Music drifted in from a distant stage. Somewhere in the crowd, a beloved friend was waiting.
And there was a perfect stillness and serenity within me, and a sense of enormous significance. Part of me didn't dare move, for fear of bursting the soap bubble of the moment. At the same time, I knew that no step I took could be the wrong one, just then. If this sounds a little mystical, I'm sorry. I'm not sure you really can describe a moment of kairos, but maybe you can help someone recognise a time in their own life when they've felt it.
The trend in Western society is towards standardising experience. Chain restaurants have extended their reach beyond a quick burger to high-end restaurants. These days, little Kai is indeed my kairos, in the way he embodies not just timelessness but time-fullness. Due to the genetic metabolic bone disorder he inherited from me, Kai has already been through a lot of medical challenges in his brief life.
He has done a lot of living in a little time, making the number of years in his quantifiable lifetime up to now seem rather irrelevant. Kai is much smaller in stature than most kids his age but has a giant personality; like kairos, he cannot be defined by any linear measurement. Kai is always fully engaged in the present moment and also easily flits away to something new that catches his fancy, like a butterfly seeking nectar.
When I tell him, "It's one o'clock, time to go to nap," he is likely to say something like, "Okay, but I have another plan: let's play! It is up to each of us to define our own kairos and to create kairos in our own image. Kairos, as the embodiment of creative, numinous, spiritual time, reminds us that we can move out of kronos at will, to create our own time.
A: Like most people, time has been a big challenge for me throughout my adult life, but it escalated after I gave birth to my first child and struggled to "do it all. I finally put myself on mission to find a new solution, and began to explore ways that I could apply my best resource imagination to my biggest problem time.
I passionately researched and experimented with imagining, viewing, and experiencing time in new ways, and at last, began to feel time expand and change at my design. I created an online course to help others do the same and saw that other people had success with these techniques as well. After that, I finally felt able to sit down and write a longer work that developed these ideas much more fully, inviting my workshop participants and students to share their responses to the exercises and techniques.
I wanted to write Creating Time to help people who feel like they don't have enough time to live the kinds of lives they want to live. I want everyone to know: when we don't have time, we have to create it, and the incredible news is that we can do so using one of the greatest resources ever to exist on our planet: human creativity.
Q: Rich projects like this are created through both kronos linear and kairos numinous time. How much kronos did it take this book idea to evolve from conception to publication?
A: Throughout the book's production, I felt very lucky that I was writing a book on the subject of time, because it kept the topic in the forefront in my mind, and helped enforce my needing to practice the techniques I was writing about! I've been self-publishing for 10 years, so it was interesting to encounter a new sense of time now that I was in the traditional publishing routine. In some ways, traditional publishing is much slower than online publishing, but the turnaround time during various stages is often much quicker.
In terms of kronos time, because I wanted to schedule traveling around the best times for my son Kai and didn't want us to be traveling for the book tour during the hot summer in the Southwest, I put the entire project in high gear as did the publisher and all the awesome contributors!
It was done in under a year, around 9 months, so it was easy to feel book "pregnant" during that time. Over time, the events of the universe follow one another in order: past, present, future. The past is fixed, the future is open … Well, all this [from current physics] has turned out to be false.
Not without existence. Explain existence? Not without time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence […] is a task for the future.
What kairos moments have you experienced lately? What have they revealed to you about how you relate "time and existence"? How can you broaden or intensify these kairos moments, while still honouring your responsibilities? Become a member and enjoy our free benefits. Get recommendations, receive personalised content in your inbox and save your favourite articles to read later. Our mission is to inspire a lifelong pursuit of growth, meaning, and adventure through travel and shared experiences.
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