The right moment

The ancient greeks had two words acknowledging two different relationships with time. The currently dominant relationship was denoted by chronos: chronological, sequential time. This is measurable time, schedule-able time, time you can run out of.

The other kind is kairos: which is the time of the 'right moment'. This kind of time is un-plan-able, unmeasurable and certainly un-scheduleable. If you miss this kind of moment, you can't work nights to make it up. This is organic, flowing time which has nothing to do with clocks, but everything to do with life and with successful endeavour. It's the kind of time I wrote about recently in The still days.

We are much misled by clocks and calendars listing a day by hours, quarter hours and minutes as if all time were equal and to be used equally. More and more we seek a window in the diary to get together with friends, sort through the loft, get out in the fresh air. But what of the right moment? Time is not a bland, homogeneous raw material to be allocated by quantity alone. How often do we end up re-scheduling because when the time comes it is so clearly not the right moment? In the case of sorting through the loft, I'm into double figures. Such is the dominance of chronos in my life though, that the next possible window for tackling it is more than a month away.

As it happens, I really rather like scheduling things. Not because I like my life to be all planned out, but because scheduling something is a bit like having done it. It gives some relief from the pressure of not-done-ness. But by scheduling I sacrifice my freedom to take the right moment, which always arrives unannounced and never waits.

A calendar with great stretches of empty hours looks unsettling. What -tick- are -tick- you -tick- doing -tick- with -tick- your -tick- chronos? Busy people are important, busy people are contributing, busy people don't have to defend their worth. But busy is a drug, and it can dull you to the sudden appearance of the right moment.

By all means, keep busy; but planning to be busy is what kills the magic of the still days. You might even achieve more by drawing back from schedules and remaining open to the rightness of a passing moment.

The still days

I always embark on January with a dash of wistful regret. The most delightful days are over for another year. Not the warm and busy abundance of Christmas, or the late night partying of New Year, fun as it all is. 

What I really treasure are the still, nameless days stretching between Christmas and New Year. The days when you sail about in an uncharted ocean of time with no plans and no commitments, only abandoning pyjamas if the weather outside looks tempting or you run out of milk. Meals happen piecemeal, and life swims in and out of imaginary worlds reading, playing with Christmas toys, having pointless conversations with loved ones, watching TV and napping on the sofa.

In our hyper-productive, artificially lit, instantly communicating world, these are the only days that you are allowed to waste. The rest of the year the clock is king. Alarms drag us to and fro as we hurry between work and school, dentist's appointments, a booked session on the badminton court. We are hunted through our days by the clock. When we're late we're anxious and apologetic; when we're early we hustle to find a productive use for the extra sliver of time.

Before the industrial revolution and factory working, before clocks and electric light, perhaps the whole of winter was like the still days. With only candles or soft oil lamps to push back the night, it would flood in sooner, you'd go to bed sooner - probably waking in the night for a while before drifting back off to sleep again before morning. That unmeasured, unscheduled time enclosed in night would be an enchanted time for musing, talking with a wakeful bedfellow, making love.

Modern sleep is almost a chore, something you need to fit in enough of before the alarm goes off. If you wake at 2am feeling refreshed you'll likely panic about how on earth you're going to get back to sleep in time to get enough sleep before the alarm goes off at 6, and how exhausted you're going to feel all day if you don't.

There's no rest anywhere except between Christmas and New Year. We pack our weekends with rewards and chores that we couldn't get done in the week, and on holidays we generally go off to have adventures: making the most of our time. But it doesn't work. We need to live more off-clock and I just can't wait till next December.

I'd like to institute my own watchless weekends. I'm not sure if it will work over such a short period of time, or if we can do this as a single household, surrounded by open shops and rumbling buses. How much of the still days is in the air? The noise level in the street? The number and demeanour of walkers in the park? But I'm going to have to try. The clock's been in charge for 400 years and that seems enough. Let's make space for organic time, dreaming time, human time. 

Don't k'nex the new year

My son has coined an expression which we have found very useful: k'nexing.

It refers to a time when a new toy (a k'nex roller coaster set) was rendered irrecoverably disappointing by youtube videos. Excited by the possibilities, he explored youtube for k'nex builds. There were some amazing things. We both ended up watching quite a lot of footage of people's amazing ingenuity. After which our own set looked pointlessly feeble.

He and I are veterans of the conversation about why we haven't got as many X as person Y. He got that the major k'nex constructions we marvelled at were built after years of practice and thousands of pounds spent on bits. But it was more than the ache of envy, which never interfered with his love for his wooden train set when other people's sets were bigger. It was that we had both been distracted from the k'nex itself by the dramatic scale of the constructions. Our little set simply couldn't satisfy our wild imaginings, although it would forever remind us of them.

Inspirations have energy, which you use to start the process of making them real. But this energy drains away over time and it is finite. There are three ways around this - only doing very quick projects; dividing big projects into a series of small endpoints and fresh beginnings; or else be more in love with the medium than the project. This last way seems the best to me, but it can't be pulled out of the hat to meet a goal.

For example, I make ceramic sculptures. I don't have a lot of time for it, and it's not something that's easy to leave half done and come back to weeks later, so in between I browse pinterest for lovely ceramics and daydream about ambitious projects. But this panoply of inspiration doesn't stop me enjoying the single small project I eventually engage in. Because I love clay, for it's own sake.

I also make 2D art in various media. I enjoy this too and so I also pin a lot of cool 2D art. But it's dangerous: I'm in love with the art, with the finished products, not the medium. I like colour, I like texture, I like compositional drama. But it's not so much about the paint, or the software, or the paper, it's about the finished effect. And that makes pinterest dangerous for my 2D work.

It's good, sometimes, to look up and see the mountain peaks of possible, but we are not dream creatures and we cannot fall upwards through pure desire. If you can't retain pleasure in the step by step, in the rocks and plants that are here underfoot, or the rise in the land a hundred yards ahead it's a miserable journey, and one you probably won't finish.

My new year's resolution is avoid over-large resolutions. So far, I'm doing okay.