Changing One’s Relationship with Time

I have been reflecting today on the notion of chronological time (chronos) and what I believe Christians have referred to as a kind of eternal time, known as kairos, which has been translated as the right or ‘opportune moment’: a moment when all other moments point toward something that is timeless. I am not sure if I quite get the terminology, but I think that Kairos must refer to moments where time itself is transcended somewhat, and all other moments are contained in that one moment.

For instance, have you ever seen a movie or read a book in which the significance of every single scene doesn’t quite come together until the very “end”? I put “end” in quotation marks, because the notion of Kairos time does not depend on the accumulation of previous moments or the ‘progress’ of cause toward effect. Rather, Kairos seems to be an expression of every moment as though they all happened in the same moment. It’s as though every moment were perfect in itself and did not require a progression whatsoever; it only took the Kairos moment to redeem these moments from their illusion of chronological progression.

  The simplest example I can give of this “Kairos” is a phenomena I have often observed in my personal experiences lately: namely, that of engaging in the struggle to ‘find meaning’ in an activity, only to find later that the activity was already meaningful, and did not require a conscious ‘addition’ of meaning to validate or substantiate it. I am sure that all of us have had moments where we thought we were wasting time in doing a very difficult task or an unrewarding one, only to find later the seeds of a story or an interesting insight in that task. It’s not that the causal, chronological nature of the task created an added meaning to it. Rather, the sense of meaning was already there at each given moment, only waiting just to be revealed by stepping off the tendency to link things chronologically in an endless sequence.

I also think that Spinoza has expressed  a similar idea of time not being an endless progression but rather a series of timeless, standalone moments which already belong to an eternity.