Lately I’ve been feeling like time is slipping through my hands. It is not ticking…it is flowing Joke Hermsen once said, time has two faces. And that is exactly how I experience it. As a child I thought time lasted an eternity: when it was only the beginning of December, Christmas seemed like miles away. Now half a century later, another week has passed before I even blinked. Funny really that I experience time differently now that I’m older. Could it be because so much has happened in the world in recent years, or was my sense of time as a child simply very limited and non-existant? I don’t know. Both, I think.
Sometimes I find myself musing about things from the past. How clear images and memories can be from 40-50 years ago always amazes me. They seem like yesterday’s. And things from yesterday seem so long ago again. Recognizable? Time is relative to my feeling.
And then there is the time that is not felt, but that the clock tells us. That was once invented to give our world hands and feet, so that we can plan ahead and say afterwards how long ago something took place. But this time is the time by which I increasingly say it flies.
The Greeks have the word kairos for inner time. What that means is that time needs to be felt. When I am daydreaming or intensely engaged in something I like, it happens to me regularly that I look up and think “is it that late already?”. But it also works the way round that, for example, in a traffic jam, it takes forever. So that is time you experience and not clock time. One moment it flies by and the next moment it ripples on, even though the time takes the same amount of time.
In my work with Ancestral Clearing, I also deal with time. I overcome that by naming it as “through all time, lives, dimensions and experiences.” In doing so, I am merging all time so that I am naming the felt present, past and future in one sentence and I am not excluding clock time.
My resolution for the new year is bringing in more kairos moments into my life. Those moments also create my best memories. Will you join me?