Time is...

I am a few hours into a "day off". Hank and the kids went to NYC to visit Hank's parents. I have the whole day to myself. My only real responsibility (and the reason I stayed behind) is to walk the dog. So, why did I feel so stressed out this morning?

Time. Too little of it. Too much to do with it. Instead of seeing the wonderful hours to fill as I see fit (which I saw only yesterday), I saw to-do lists. Housecleaning, emails piled up, phone calls to make, shopping to be done, etc. I realized that there was no way I had the time, the discipline, or the energy to get through it all. Tomorrow would come too quickly with all its plans and responsibilities and I'd have lost my chance. 

So, I did what any self-respecting sloth would do.  Played too much Spider Solitaire, under the guise of, "It's early, it's Sunday, and I'm not quite awake." Then I went upstairs to do my morning routine and found between the pages of a pink-covered book exactly what I needed.

The book is Sarah Ban Breathnach's "Simple Abundance:A Daybook of Comfort and Joy". I think I first bought this book more than ten years ago. Back then, I couldn't get into it and after it sat on my shelf for a while, I gave it away. But the expression goes, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears" and so last month, I heard Oprah interview Breathnach (you can get it at Oprah.com's Spirit Channel) and decided to give the book another try.  If you've heard of Oprah's practice of keeping a gratitude journal, this is the book that inspired that. The daybook has a reading for each day of the year. Today's is entitled, "A Tale of Two Times."  In it she quotes poet Henry Van Dyke, "Time is/Too slow for those who Wait/Too swift for those who Fear/Too long for those who Grieve/Too short for those who Rejoice..." We all know how fickle time is - Harry and Kit found it unbearably long last year in Algebra class, vacations are always too short, their train ride today will be too long.

Breathnach goes on to explain the ancient Greek idea of time's dual nature; chronos and kairos. Chronos is the aspect of time that most of us live with most of the time - and the aspect of time I felt pressing on me this morning. It's deadlines, dropping the kids off and picking them up on time, the alarm clock ringing, the dog barking for dinner, trying to get it all done. Kairos, on the other hand, is infinite time, flow, passion, love, joy.  We live in chronos but we wish for kairos. Again, from Breathnach, "Chronos requires speed so that it won't be wasted. Kairos requires space so that it might be savored." Chronos is doing, kairos is being.

Needless to say, this was the reading I needed just then. I continued on my morning routine, folding the laundry (after the ecstasy, the laundry), doing my Yoga, meditating. And that's how I got to my moment of kairos. Interestingly, I've noticed that when I get to that still, peaceful, and joyful kairotic place when meditating, I don't need to stay there long. I think there's a good reason for this - the nature of kairos is infinite. Although it has to do with time, by its very nature, it has to do with the timelessness of time. So, a few minutes of it or many seems to be all the same. 

The end of Van Dyke's poem is, "But for those who love, time is eternity." Which is why when we are totally absorbed doing something we love, time seems to stop, we are unaware of its passage. I get there through writing, gardening, singing loudly as I drive. You, no doubt, have other ways. Whatever they are, I believe that no matter how busy we are in chronos, in order to live a full and happy live, we have got to make time to get to kairos.