kairos

An interesting way to think about time.  

Quantitative (chronos) versus qualitative (kairos)...

Haven't you gotten the feeling sometimes that, as C.S. Lewis said in The Great Divorce, "this moment contains all other moments"?

That's kind of how I feel right now.  Not only am I in an "in-between" time in a major way, I can see how precious that is...what an opportunity it is.  I am trying to live fully in this kairos time.  Someone I know put it "growing into myself..."  I wish I could express it as fully and personally.  But I guess part of growing into yourself is also letting your own voice be your own, even though you like others' so much better.  It means starting to see yourself as you really are...not as you want to be, though that has its place, and not as you've always imagined yourself to be.  I'm finding that a really powerful experience, as it feels like my childhood aspirations and self-image--who I always thought I was and would become-- are being stretched and torn away from what I see is my actual self.  Who I've become in the meantime.  

In an earlier life stage, we learn to live in our bodies: awkward and gangly, we're like a puppy who doesn't understand why it's knocking things over right and left.  Now, it's my emotional self that wonders why it's so clumsy.  No wonder this life stage is about searching for intimacy...we've learned what it takes to belong in a group, what signals to send ourselves and others to show who we are, why we're worthy of time and attention.  But intimacy is about excavating our real selves from the mass we've already, sometimes unwittingly, constructed.  And believing that what we have there is still worthy of others' time and attention...that our true self is enough.  That it's lovable.  That someone will find it worthwhile...and that we will, too. 

Like archaeologists, we have to be gentle with the real artifacts we find buried in the soil...our own and others'.  Maybe what we find will be brittle and broken.  Maybe it will be perfectly preserved.  Maybe we will find a simple jar, maybe we will find a city.  And maybe I'm way behind.

But looking at it another way...this process and time is about entrusting ourselves with the  power we find in our simple, human, uncharted wildness.  And we have to grow into that too.  

"The water, the water
Came to realize
Its dangerous size
The mountain, the mountain
Came to recognize
Its steep and rocky sides
More than realized"