Finding My Rhythm

Writing in Kairos Time

I’m finally here, in this moment, doing what I set out to do long before I ever incarnated in this time, this place.

I’ve always loved reading, and words, and writing. I’ve always known that somehow my destiny is tied to sharing my words, both written and spoken. I had an inkling of how; a deep pull of purpose I purposely ignored.

Well, ignored is not entirely true; I vocalised occasionally what I wanted to do — what I felt compelled to do, I dreamed of it from time to time — but I never actually did it. I held myself against the impossible standards of linear, structured time, and always felt lacking, misaligned, overwhelmed; which led to me criticising myself and convincing myself I had neither the courage, the confidence, nor the skill to fulfil what I felt deeply in my heart.

And so that passion lingered there — yes sometimes ignored — sometimes misdirected, sometimes mournfully ruminated upon. What I didn’t realise though, was that I was being led, I was following my purpose, I was just following a different timing, a different rhythm, to the outside world.

I’ve tried to live by the tick of the clock, march to the beat of the modern-day drum, and although I can keep step with it sometimes, more often than not I seem to lag behind in some alternately timed universe. Simple things like being “on time” feel like a real struggle, even when I make the effort to be on time. Many years ago — in what does feel like a completely different universe — I lived just a two-minute walk from the government office I worked in. Starting time was 9:00 a.m. prompt, and even though I left home in more than enough time to be early, invariably I’d be rushing through the door by the stroke of nine.

A manager once pulled me aside and said,

“Jonathan, you think you’ll be on time because you’ve left your house before 9:00 a.m., don’t you? Whether it’s an hour before or even just a minute, it’s all the same to you — because you’ve left before 9:00 a.m., it makes sense that you’ll arrive before 9:00 a.m., whether you’ve actually left enough time for your journey or not.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed, “that’s exactly it!”

“I understand” she said.

And for the first time, I realised that I had a different sense of timing to most people. I had a different rhythm.

For the first time, I began to understand there are different kinds of time.

You see, time never has really made much sense to me. It’s something I just didn’t get. Oh yes, I see it as perfectly necessary for the functioning of our modern-day world, but then, our modern-day world has never made sense to me either — quite frankly, the way we structure and organise our lives is absurd. So maybe it’s not that I don’t understand time; it’s more that I feel the way that we measure time is wrong.

First of all, we’ve tried to quantify it, measure it, and put it into neat little boxes and categories. For example, we have 60 seconds that make up a minute, and then 60 minutes that make up an hour, and then 24 hours make up a day (though 8 of those hours are night). We have 365 days in a year, but no we haven’t actually got that quite right because we have some time left over which is not accounted for, so we have an extra ‘day’ every four years.

Come on, does that sound right to you? Or even logical? Well to my freedom-loving spirit it feels like a whole load of made up nonsense designed to keep us trapped in some illusory structure of “time” that keeps us stressed and chasing our (metaphorical) tails.

So when that manager saw and acknowledged I was on a different time, I felt seen — seen by myself, and I suddenly realised that maybe I wasn’t so wrong after all.

When my mother asks how long I’ll be while she’s waiting for me, I’ll say ten minutes. It sounds like the right thing to say for what I know will be a short period of time. And she always says to me, “Jonathan, my darling child, your ten minutes could mean anything up to a few hours. You have no conception of time at all, you never have”.

But I’m not fibbing, or wilfully misleading, I’m just trying to quantify something that I don’t know how to quantify in order to satisfy someone’s question. Like when I’m asked, “When will you be here?”

Well, I’ll be there when I’m there, until then I’ll be here, until I’m not. Make sense? It does to me — perfect, logical sense.

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The Two Faces of Time

It seems I’m not the only one to have this view of time — far from it. In ancient Greek philosophy, time wasn’t considered to be one-dimensional; the Greeks had two words for it — Chronos and Kairos —because they understood that not all time is the same.

Chronos is structured, linear time. It is quantitative and measures how long something takes. It’s the ticking of the clock, the passing time of the calendar — it is deadlines and productivity. It marches mercilessly onwards, never stopping, never pausing, ruthless in its pursuit of an imagined future that never arrives. It’s the measure by which we function as a society; Chronos is about control, being ruled by something that will eventually discard us.

Chronos frames time into past-present-future to give us the illusion of momentum and continuity, but in reality, only the present exists. Chronos pressures and misleads us. It is not to be trusted.

Kairos, on the other hand, is sacred, Divine timing. Whereas Chronos could be said to be horizontal time, stretching across, Kairos is vertical time — it drops in at the right moment, when alignment happens. It frames time as presence and purpose, not duration.

Kairos belongs not to the controlled structure of third dimensional living; it resides in the soul and speaks through intuition, inspiration and synchronicity. It is the time of perfect rhythm — with oneself and with the Universe as a whole. The beauty of Kairos is that we can never say when it will happen, it just happens, right there in the moment, when alignment, life, and rhythm, all blend into their splendid, wonderful dance.

This is not to say that the two cannot co-exist. The key is to be in the rhythm of Kairos, and to allow Chronos to serve Kairos — using clock time to create containers, but not to cage. This is the point of manifestation, when the two harmoniously dance together, their rhythms perfectly balanced.

Reflect upon your own life experiences for a moment, and you will easily be able to recall when time changed for you. Think of those moments as a child when time just seemed to stop; when you were entirely engrossed in some activity, a story, an imagining. Completely immersed in your joy.

You’ll be able to recall numerous other times too when time seemed to slow down or speed up, depending on what you were doing — or rather, what you were thinking about. In those moments you stepped out of structured, measurable Chronos time, and entered the more fluid, rhythmic—and kinder—Kairos time.

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I read something once that beautifully encapsulated this Divine moment where Chronos and Kairos meet:

“Ask a tree what time it is, and what will it say? It will say it is ‘Now’”.

Time is now, it can’t be anything else. How could it possibly be any other time?

As I write this, I am just two months shy of my 47th birthday. I’ve waited a long time to get here, if you believe old Chronos. He would tell you that I’ve wasted so much time; that I should’ve begun this many moons ago; and that I can’t possibly now achieve all that I am meant to, as so much time has gone. But this is the great deception of Chronos — where is all this supposed lost time he accuses me of wasting? Where is this future time that I’ve squandered? Exactly, where is it? It does not exist. It’s only Now. For only now can ever exist.

If you follow that kinder companion, Kairos, he will tell you that I’ve arrived perfectly on time, exactly at the moment I’m meant to arrive, the moment my rhythm has been leading me to all my life. I’ve arrived Now.

And here I am, in this moment, doing exactly what I set out to do, long, long before I incarnated upon this plane.

And there is one question I would like to ask you — where are you: chasing the clock, or following your rhythm?

With love —

Jonathan