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.
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