“What year is it?”: CHRONOS VS. KAIROS time

Have you ever woken up one day and realised
That everything you thought you knew was wrong?
That every single decision you have ever made
In your entire life
Was also wrong?
Well I have.
And it feels really good.

— Headache, The Pavement is my Pillow Talk

Found these images of Greek images in this very odd 1970s book, written in Czech, from the Christian thrift store. Lol.

What’s one major sign that you're undergoing a radical shift in your consciousness? Your concept of linear time has gone a bit… askew.

“What year is it?” is something people seem to ask me, off-handedly, with increasing frequency during 1:1 sessions.

We humans blame the pandemic, the subsequent lock down, and the prevalence of the internet in our daily lives. But to me, confusion surrounding time is also a sign of a collective shift in consciousness.

Lucky for us, the ancient Greeks developed some tools to help their fellow humans make sense of it all.

Visual aid: Chronos vs. kairos time tools.

Chronos (like, chornological) time is quantitative time — i.e. how time is kept via clocks and calendars. And chronos time keeps moving forward. I actually remember the time-clock-punching software at my first job was called Chronos.

Kairos time, or “deep time”, is measured by feelings — it’s qualitative. Experiencing kairos time is when you, as a human being, are in charge of your experience of time and moving through it. It can be experienced by becoming radically present; like when we witness a super rare bird fly overhead, or meet another soul who simply ‘makes time stand still’.

Kairos time can be accessed when you’re in a state of relaxation, glee bliss, and radical presence. It can also be willingly entered when you decide to meditate, or alter your consciousness with music, or become radically present.

If I had to sum up (as writers do) the current shift in global consciousness, I’d say it feels like more and more people are willingly experiencing kairos time.

More kairos time and less chornos time = more being and less doing. More feeling and less thinking. More play and less work. More presence, less convenience. More wonder, less certainty.

More awakening, less autopilot. More intuition, less conditioning. More truth, less instruction. More living, less pretending. More surrender, less control.

Experiencing more kairos time does require we release our grip and reliance on the ever-present chronos time. It means we surrender to the big picture from time to time, and we create room for change.

This is a change that brings me great hope for the future.

Sign up for my new course, Tapped In, because we will be having a lot of conversations like this. We start July 8.