Is time worth taking advantage of? Should we live in fear of running out of time? Two gods from Greek mythology, Cronus and Kairos, They help us distinguish two types of time.
Has a person who is 45 years old already lived half his life or does he have half his life left to live? Through the symbolism of these Greek gods of time We can understand two types of time that must coexist.
Chronos: time is limited
Since Pope Sabinian ordered that the bells of the monasteries ring seven times a day so that the work of the monks would be rhythmic to this rhythm (and not to that of the Sun, the Moon and the seasons), until the Industrial Revolution, which established the dogma that «time is money»we have run after him, in the vain hope of catching up with him.
Even children, to symbolize their entry into responsibility, were given a watch.
The Greeks had a fearsome god to mean this type of time:Cronus, the Roman Saturn.
Represented as a giant that devours his children, is the time that passes, unrepeatable and irrecoverablethat the god subtracts from us every moment of what remains of our life.
A limited time, which they tell us we have to take advantage ofalthough it is not always clear how to do it, nor do we pay attention to that advice.
This conception of time generates the need to manage itof having projects and ambitions… and promotes such curious tics as those related to temporal reorientation: checking the time from time to time, writing down anniversaries of family and friends, and, above all, organizing the agenda.
An increasingly scarce time (despite the increase in life expectancy) since the consumer society turns it into a precarious good by making it necessary not only to obtain goods, but to «enjoy» them once acquired.
AND the paradox: the awareness that we have a limited amount of time, sometimes pushes us to forget the anguish that it generates, to forget how important it is and waste it on avoidance activities or become addicted to urgencyone of the most common self-destructive behaviors in our societies.
Kairos: live in the moment
But the Greeks also had another god, less known but no less important, to define another perspective of time: Kairos. A kind of being small and bald with a single tuft of hair near the forehead.
If the person was able to hold on to it at the right moment, luck smiled on him; On the other hand, if he took a single moment longer, his hands would slip and he would lose that wonderful opportunity to be happy.
From there derives the popular expression of «the occasion is painted bald… and with only one hair» (that someone takes!).
It is about a quality time impossible to measure with the clock. A time that does not usually coincide with the monotonous rhythm of the second hand, because you live based on the emotional charge you have.
We build ourselves from it; we are what we areand nothing else, because of those special momentsof those decisions that constitute the essence of our life experience.
We are products of our history, even if we do not know it.
Quality time… or quantity of time?
say that Cronos is the time that leads us to death and Kairos is the time that brings us back to life. It sounds poetic, but it would be unfair.
Cronos is necessary for our developmentimportant in our projects and inevitable, at least in the temporally regulated world in which we live; That’s why the alarm clock rings every morning.
The problem lies in the imbalance of our temporary education. In the supremacy of one time over the other; in our confusion between what is urgent and what is important.
We will always have opportunities within our reachbut only if we know how to discover them (and it is not easy, since everything requires training) will we be able to grab the lock of hair from Kairos’s head on the fly.