More of the much needed wisdom from my longtime
teacher, Michael Meade. — Molly
Change, which is the only constant thing in this world, happens
in the flash of a moment. People can prepare for a great change and
make careful plans; yet in order to make the change, all preparations
and expectations must be released in favor of a flash of vision and
inspiration. Of course, ancient people had a name for that moment when
time stands still, when the usual forces are suspended and almost
anything can happen. In Sanskrit, the opportune moment was called ksana,
or “the flash in time, the inspired instant.” In Greek the moment that
becomes momentous was termed kairos. The kairos moment opens before us
and we must be as swift as a bird or else miss out on the opportunity to
slip past the guardians and ride through the gates of time. Kairos
names the moment of sweeping change that arrives “just in the nick of
time” and turns everything around. The opportune moment is a crack in
time, a breach in the march of time in which the eternal enters and
redeems us from certain doom.
The
ancient Greeks had two primary words for time: kronos and kairos.
Kronos referred to sequential time, the “chronological” order of time
marching on; the arrow of linear time always moving forward. Thus, time
waits for no one. Kronos is quantifiable and measurable time; the hour
glass emptying out, the end of time coming ever closer and closer.
"Kairos
referred to a different order of time altogether, a timeless stretch
that cannot be scheduled ahead of time; an alteration of time in which
impossible things become momentarily possible. Whereas kronos stands for
quantitative time, kairos time is qualitative in nature."
Under
the unforgiving rule of kronos we have to be on time, do our time and
pay our dues. When we are under the influence of kairos, time stops and
opens before us. There is a break in time as something timeless and
beyond time enters and alters the world around us. The kairos moment
arrives when it will, when the time is just right, when things become
more possible and life becomes ripe for change. Kairos is the mythic
moment that is end and beginning at once, when the hard pulse of time
becomes “once upon a time” and past, present, and future secretly
converse with each other.
In
many ways we have entered a kairos moment, a time beset with both
danger and opportunity as the world tries to change amidst the clashing
of entrenched ideas and fixed beliefs and the availability of crushing
weapons of all kinds. There is an increasing tendency for issues to
polarize and for people to see only one side of each issue. Under the
rule of reason and the rise of ideologies of all kinds people simply
pick one side and reject the other as being wrong-headed, unreasonable
or even insane.
As
the dependence upon reason has grown, a loss of imagination has
developed as well as the deeper understandings traditionally provided by
the mythic imagination needed to make sense of a volatile world. The
single eye of reason can become blind to greater visions and deeper
insights that might shift pieces in a stalemate or loosen polarized
positions and allow an unexpected third way to open.
The
old idea of the kairos moment brought more than the power of reason to
bear on the issue at hand as the ancient world included more than one
way of thinking. The current moment in which oppositions throughout the
world intensify and so many elements of culture become paralyzed may be
the right moment for people to turn to mythic imagination again.
Creative imagination is the only outcome of conflict that can satisfy
the soul, and myths can provide universal examples of creative
solutions.
— Michael Meade
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