Live Immediately

?"The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining??The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

?– Seneca

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As we come off the back of organising our time and adapting to a new university-wide teaching workload model, I have been reflecting on the importance of time and how we conceive of it. The ancient Greeks had two different words for the concept of time — ‘chronos’ and ‘kairos.’ The word ‘chronos’ is more widely known to us and refers to quantitative (measured and ticking) time. Chronos is how we conceive of time in our modern world – the very measured and forward driving movement of time. Chronos time is constantly marching on in our smart phones, our tablets, our computers, and calendars. However, the more interesting, and possibly more meaningful, concept of time is ‘kairos.’ Kairos is a concept central to the?ancient Greek Sophist philosophers, who believed that one needs to take advantage of changing and contingent circumstances – an ancient version of ‘living in the moment.’ In this sense kairos is qualitative time – where one sees?the opportunity to move forward in the present, rather than being tethered helplessly to the incessant ticking of the clock.

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The visualisation of these two figures in Greek mythologies mirror the concepts adeptly. Chronos is normally portrayed as a grumpy old man with a bushy white beard holding a scythe or sickle (used to symbolise the harvest). In Christian art, elements of Chronos morphed into the symbols used to represent the Grim Reaper.? The lesser-known figure of Kairos (also known as Caerus) is portrayed as fit young man who is constantly in motion, primary bald but with a single long, wavy tendril of blonde hair. He can easily be seized by the hair hanging over his face when he is arriving. But once he has passed by, no one can grasp him, the back of his head being bald. Whereas chronos represents the dying moment – kairos represents the fleeting moment of “a favourable opportunity opposing the fate of man.”

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We can choose to measure our time by the kairos rather than chronos moments. Kairos moments are the moments of wonder, of joy, of serenity, of splendour. I experienced one such moment last week during a packed two-day schedule reviewing a course with colleagues in Melbourne. Despite a late-night arrival, I woke up early on the first morning and took a jog along the Yarra. A full moon still hung in the sky as the dawn emerged – painting the river in a soft pink glow. Hot air balloons drifted across this fleeting scene with the glow of flames flickering them higher and higher across the horizon. Behind loomed the office skyscrapers and highways teeming with traffic - millions of people driving forward a new day of busy schedules. Yet in that moment I relished in the serenity of the dawn and the beauty of the fleeting light reflecting on the river.? In our hectic academic lives, it’s important to remember that chronological time will continue to march us onward but that kairological time is always accessible for us should we choose to focus on it.

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