I’d like to take a moment to appreciate just how significant the moment of kairos is.
For those of you who don’t know, “kairos” is a Greek word that means anything from “opportune time” or “right place, right venue, right moment” – and if you hadn’t encountered it before, it’s OK – I didn’t either before the sermons came along, I forgot them all, and I rediscovered the word in a blaze of etymology and frenzied reading but that’s a story for another day.
The reason I’m thinking of this word today though, is that I’ve been beset with a deep appreciation for the fact that a blog post like this may come or it may not come – if it does come, it’s because I intentionally thought about it, decided to sit down, and actually began to type – it is a rare occasion that many gates could have impeded but somehow on this day did not.
Why?
If I tell myself on a particular morning that I will do it ten minutes later after the coffee, I may get distracted – I may tell myself that I can do it later during the day but I may not; I may have a hundred inspirations and decide, either legitimately or not legitimately, to pursue the idea at the later point – if I remember (yet another gate to cross!), then sure it might happen – but what other hundreds or thousands of possible frictions might there be that might stop me from chronicling my immediate thoughts, words, deeds are there beyond my already exacting sense that whoops, this isn’t good enough for publication?
I find myself today at an opportune time – a kairos – not to answer all these questions right away, but definitely to start evaluating/re-evaluating them.
I’d like to say that there was a specific moment that it came about, but I don’t think that’s totally correct – yet I don’t think it’s totally correct to say that it all started at some indeterminate point in the past that wasn’t this morning.
If I sound vague at the moment, let’s just then say that I’ve been hit with the realization that there is so little time in this life yet so many things to accomplish and to make happen, and that I know that it’s not by willpower alone that I will overcome that inner interstice of mine that seems to be perpetually trying to cross over into the fulfillment of an unattainable object – yet though it may be unattainable, a part of me seeks it out shamelessly, not through that willpower, but through systems, coordination – the little tricks that make it possible for a person to either fool or flow themselves into that strange synthesis that lies in the beyond.