TIME

Time is a big bugaboo for me. It's not that I can't figure out how to "manage" it. It's just that I never feel like a temporal-based existence is my natural world. I feel out of place in time. Temporally displaced, perhaps.

I recognize the benefits of experiencing "generations of time." We can't very well exercise agency--make choices--without time, for there would be no cause and effect. There would be nothing temporally linear, so that we could see the results of our choices and actions. And that's a valuable lesson--imperative, even.

And I see how time is a resource and that we are stewards of the time we're allotted here, just as we are stewards of all the other resources we've been given--our bodies, our opportunities, our talents. That is to say, what we choose to do with our time matters, because of how it impacts our spiritual development.

But I still don't like it. Chronos time, I mean--the linear, chronological, point-by-point sort of time that we measure our days and lives by. There are ways to break through that narrow experience of Chronos time, however, into Kairos time, sacred time. I know you've experienced it, those in-between moments, that sensation of being caught up into something Other, where time is irrelevant and there is only you and the eternal moment. Maybe you get there through yoga or meditation or prayer, as I sometimes do. Sometimes you catch a glimmer of Kairos, the "supreme moment", as the Greeks termed it, in an exalting experience of music or nature or love. And when you're there, in that moment, don't you feel like you've come Home? Don't you feel like you've arrived where you truly belong? Don't you wish the moment would never end?

But it does end, and we are sucked back into our temporal world, like when Christopher Reeves is sucked back into his own time when he pulls that penny out of his jacket pocket in the movie "Somewhere in Time." And even though we acknowledge the benefits and gifts of our current somewhere-in-time status, it still sucks to be dragged back.

It's a testy beast, time is. Generally, it gives us the impression that there's either not enough of it, or too much, depending on the day's demands and our life circumstances. Yesterday, I worked non-stop for 16 hours and still didn't finish my list. And I remember my great grandmother, ready and waiting for years to die. Too little, too much.

Or maybe it's just right. Maybe we all get exactly the amount of time we need and it's up to us to be good stewards, to reap the benefits of our wise use of time. I really am grateful to be living in a Chronos world, even though I feel like a foreigner here. I know I learn things I could not in any other setting.

And with that, it's time for bed, where dreams pull me back into Kairos . . . where I belong.