A Sense of Time
Kairos time is about the quality of time, the capacity to find the proper or opportune time for action
Pronouns come in subjective and objective forms, singular and plural. Language, in its form, presumes separation of one from another. Is there a way beyond this limitation of language? This prose attempts to transcend the limitation of the subjective and objective, the singular and the plural by using the pronoun “one”. If it is difficult to find the line that divides one from another, that the universe is the only atom, the indivisible unit of existence, it seems like the best place to start to call this unity in diversity “one”.
Surely, this experiment will break down at some point. Certain forms of grammatical structure might be inaccessible, if such constraints were placed on the language. The active voice becomes passive.
The embodied sense of awareness comes with the sense of being alive. In the here and now, one grows a sense of significance. As infants, one can cry and hear the sound. There is a cause and there is an effect. One can imagine that is how one first learns of one’s sense of agency. In the womb, a child is one with the mother, biological and physically interwoven. At birth, a child is physically separated, but also psychologically. Nurturing is an intentional action and an intimate process of sensing the meanings of sounds, gestures, and facial expressions as emotional cues and physical responses.
For the human species, sensitivity is necessary for survival. Yet, we have outsourced sensitivity to mechanical devices and sensors to detect and signal changes over time. The machines that stand in between one and another to facilitate the communication of this information are a form of media. As in art, a medium is the material on the substrate—the canvas of a painting, for example—that forms the image. A viewer perceives a pattern that can be interpreted as an image.
Time seems to be the substrate for the medium of experience. Perhaps, it is time that is the medium for the motion and events that consciousness observes.
In an ensoulment session with Veronica Anderson, we were speaking of managing time, energy, and resources last week. I was explaining how I left a web agency, because I did not like someone else managing my time, energy, and resources. I did not want to be managed as a profit center and a human resource for others to exploit solely for their own benefit or to design, build, and maintain the infrastructure for perpetuating the status quo.
Time, energy, and matter are transformed by life into synchronicity, synergy, and synarchy as an expression of unity through synthesis, and as a manifestation of the process of creativity through syntropy.
This prompted an exploration of the different notions of time: chronos (quantitative) and kairos (qualitative). Kairos is about the quality of time, the capacity to find the proper or opportune time for action. There is a difference between “telling the time,” in the way we have been taught to read clocks and calendars, and feeling when the time is right to act, to sense the moment of decision.
Patience feels like the wisdom to discern the quality of time, beyond a sense of scarcity, beyond the urgent, to be available to the moment because one is living, fully embodied, in the moment.
How can I feel time rather than measure it? How can I improvise in the moment, like a jazz musician, to feel when to play and how to play? I can play in tune with the rhythms of life, the heartbeat, the breath, the waves of the ocean, the tides, the rotation of the Earth (daily cycle), the circadian rhythm, the orbit of the Moon (lunar cycle), the reproductive cycle, the seasons cycle, the annual, and the life cycles.
This feels like my art: cartographer of the heart, to help us navigate metaphysical gravity.
This week, I have been exploring ways of understanding the rhythms of life and the quality of time as it relates to the quantities of time.
This seems to be the most accurate way I have found to visualize how the cycles compare with each other: daily, weekly, monthly, annual, compared to the lunar cycles, represented as a circular sine wave. The crest of the sine wave is always a full moon. The trough is always a new moon.
Kairos Time — feeling the proper or opportune time to decide or act
This is a kind of NYC subway map focusing on the gravitational relationships between the Sun, Earth, and Moon. The scales are out of proportion to accentuate the relationships. Perhaps there is a slider or particular gestures allow the ability to scrub forwards and backwards in time. The orbit of the Earth and the wave motion of the Moon could be animated. This plan shows key frames of the motion. This interface could be juxtaposed with a particular place and perspective on Earth that corresponds to the time.
This map of experience could be filtered to display photos from a particular day or music from a playlist from a particular year. Or a journal entry from a particular day, cross-referencing what was happening in that bioregion.
What if you could tune into the day you were born and what was significant about the relationships of energy at that moment? If we could navigate an Akashic record, how might we explore it?
The path of the Moon would rotate around the Earth following the path of the wave at the same time. Scrubbing back and forth in time would create a Spirograph pattern because of the offset of the solar orbit and lunar orbit.
Now that I look at this colour version of my design for kairos time, I feel like I am looking into the iris of the divine, full of light, and it becomes a window to illuminate my own soul.
May this coming year be full of synchronicity, synergy, synarchy, synthesis, and syntropy.
So evocative, love the graphics!
Mind-blowing.