It is one a.m. or it is midnight, depending upon your point of view. It is clock-change night. The end of British Summer Time. In truth we’re almost at the other side of Autumn already, for all that Summer lingered long this year. The weather changed abruptly. The evenings seemed to darken suddenly in amongst the unseasonal warmth of the days.
Elsewhere in the world they call this manipulation of clock-time “Daylight Saving Time” as if daylight is something we can catch in a jar like a firefly to see it later. Each time the re-set comes around it reminds me of the absurdity of chronos. Clock-time. Human-time.
I understand the industrial era need for standard time. I understand the long-standing human need for “mid-day” not to be in the middle of the night, which led to the demarcation of the world into different time zones. But the more I think about it, the more the artificiality of it becomes apparent. And the more I want to disconnect from it.
I have a gold pendant that I wear whenever I need reminding that these marked hours are essentially meaningless.
They are only a means of fitting in with what the world, the industrial, capitalist, essentially
‘controlling’ world wants of us.
The small medallion is engraved with the yinyang symbol of the eternal shifting balance of the masculine and feminine, the strength and the weakness, the flow and the stay. In my mind the reverse is engraved with my mantra of one particular year: kairos not chronos. That is not so. Perhaps it was too much to fit into the small space. I cannot remember. The reverse actually reads quite simply: Kairos the one word, above an infinity sigil.
I guess that also says it all. Enough to remind me.
Definitions of kairos vary. Some call it deep time, where our perceptions of measured time cease to exist. Some call it natural time, where we respond to the planetary movements through day and night, through seasonality that is not cut and measured but simply observed and absorbed and lived within. Others say it is ‘the perfect propitious moment’.
Whichever way, it is closer to divine timing than to any human clock-watching.
Part of my sense of needing to re-align emerges from this need I have been aware of for years of wanting to step outside of time.
By which I mean outside of chronos. BST. GMT. UST. The shape of the hands on the clock. The digital numbers on the wall, on the device, everywhere. I feel the need to connect with a deeper sense of the passage of the seasons and more deeply the passage of the ages – and maybe my place within them.
Understanding what it means to step outside of time and into yourself requires a breaking of all the rules, including your own. I start to wonder which of mine to break first…and which, contrariwise, I want to find an accommodation for.
I do not know.
I have been feeling the change in the air, or more accurately in the substrate, for a while now. I have been feeling my foothold tremble. Not the seismic upheaval that completely changed my life seven years ago…something more subtle, more deeply subterranean, an after-shock that barely ripples the surface.
Seven years. I’ve written it so many times in the last few weeks and months without registering the significance of the number.
Seven years.
Of course it is time for the next move.
It is not just me though. Others are feeling a similar agitation. Outgrowing your niche. The messy middle. Unalignment. These are some of the expressions landing in my inbox. Something is happening. I am not going to say that I know what it is. I do not. I only know that I am ready to step out of chronos and into kairos
– and if that means breakfasting on the remains of last night’s wine and potato crisps, I am not going to ask permission.
If it means having lunch at 11a.m. or at 3p.m. why not?
If it means not eating a proper meal at all on any given day…or sleeping early or late or both…if it means abandoning all plans to spend the day cooking something more nutritious to keep me going for a week…if it means sitting at my desk writing when I had planned to be walking…or the opposite…if it means working in the garden when I could be practicing the form…if it means watching rubbish tv at midnight because I still need to come down from the ‘high’ of four or five
hours of music indulgence…if it means paying more for my train tickets because the flexibility of the journey means more than the saving of the pounds…if it means making fewer promises and allowing for more maybes…if it means saying ‘no’ more often, so that I can say ‘yes’ to the unexpected…if it means choosing to not answer your questions about why and how much…if it means having to go it alone…if it means sometimes having to beg for help…if it means getting it wrong (a lot!)…if it means waiting…if it means making a fool of myself again…if it means giving up occasionally…whatever it means...
I am not going to ask permission. I am not going to ask for forgiveness.
I’m going totake a leap of faith.
In the morning of what is now yesterday, my musings took me with Robert Macfarlane to Ecuador on part of his quest to discover whether a river is alive. He is with people who can hear the planet – the waters, the trees, the fungi – in a way that I am deeply envious of. People who have devoted their lives to the investigation of what our fellow earth-dwellers are trying to tell us and to protect them so that they can.
I envy them – these people – not their lifestyle, but the resilience and fortitude and knowledge and deep-seated passion that enabled them to choose that lifestyle and not for a second regret it. I envy them the way I envy people of pure religious faith. That I would not choose to follow either path is beside the point. I would, if it were possible some other as yet unknown way for me, want to have that certainty of purpose.
I am grateful that such people exist. Whatever their science or religion, whatever our instinctive or in-built, indoctrinated, response to what they have to say: we should listen to them. There is much yet to learn, and maybe also a great deal to forget. If we listen to them all, we may work out which is which.
In Ecuador there are fallen logs that are bright with the veined luminescence of the fungi within them and I am reminded of my reading of Entangled Web – and also that I have not yet acquired my own copy of that book which I need to return to (again and again). I am reminded how I felt reading it: the beginnings of an understanding of my place in the world, not as my “self”, but as a simple component, a single human being.
It is a reminder of all there is about my life that has not yet ‘shifted’ and so remains unaligned. All the things I know I need / want to do and have barely started.
It is the reminder that I haven’t taken the leap – the several, cascading jumps and dives – because faith – call it trust if you’d prefer – is something I am not very good at. I am better at resistance, at renegotiating with myself, at ifs and buts and maybe-tomorrows. But I know that’s not going to work anymore.
I’m better at plodding, organising, getting the stuff done, than I am at letting go, letting be. I’m better at grounding than I am at flying. All the things I am good at are grounded in chronos, in timetables and project plans and lists. And it isn’t working any more.
Kairos is calling me. I need to start breaking my own rules.
