Cronos Kairos: two types of time according to Greek mythology

Is time to take advantage of it? Should we live in fear of running out of time? Two gods from Greek mythology, Cronos and Kairos, They help us distinguish two kinds of time.

Has a person who is 45 years old already lived half of his life or does he have half a life left to live? through the symbolism of these Greek gods of time we can understand two types of time that must coexist.

Chronos: time is limited

Since Pope Sabinian ordered the bells of the monasteries to ring seven times a day so that the work of the monks would follow this rhythm (and not that of the Sun, the Moon and the seasons), until the Industrial Revolution, which established the dogma that “the time is gold”we have run after him, in the vain hope of catching up with him.

Even children, to symbolize their entry into responsibility, were given a watch.

The Greeks had a fearsome god to signify this kind of time: Chronos, the Roman Saturn.

represented as a giant that devours its children, is the time that passes, unrepeatable and unrecoverablethat the god is subtracting us at every moment of what we have left of life.

A limited time, which they tell us that we have to take advantage ofalthough it is not always clear how to do it, nor do we pay attention to those tips.

This conception of time generates the need to manage itof having projects and ambitions… and it promotes tics as curious as those related to temporal reorientation: checking the time from time to time, writing down anniversaries of family and friends, and, above all, organizing the agenda.

An increasingly scarce time (despite the increase in life expectancy) since the consumer society turns it into a precarious good by making it necessary not only to obtain goods, but to “enjoy” them once acquired.

AND the paradox: the awareness that we have a limited amount of time sometimes pushes us to forget the anguish that it generates, to forget how important it is and waste it on avoidance activities or become addicted to urgencyone of the most common self-destructive behaviors in our societies.

Kairos: live in the moment

But the Greeks also had another god, less known but no less important, to define. another perspective of time: Kairos. A kind of being small and bald with a single lock of hair near the forehead.

If the person was able to grab hold of him at the right moment, luck smiled on him; on the other hand, if he took a single moment longer, his hands would slip and he would lose that wonderful opportunity to be happy.

From this derives the popular expression of “the occasion is painted bald… and with only one hair” (someone take away!).

Is about a quality time impossible to measure with the clock. A time that does not usually coincide with the monotonous rhythm of the second hand, because you live based on the affective load that you have.

We build ourselves from it; we are what we areand not something else, because of those special momentsof those decisions that constitute the essence of our vital experience.

We are products of our history, even if we don’t know it.

Quality time or quantity of time?

To say that Chronos is the time that leads us to death and Kairos is the one that brings us back to life. It sounds poetic, but it would be unfair.

Chronos is necessary for our development, important in our projects and inevitable, at least in the temporarily patterned world in which we live; That’s why every morning the alarm goes off.

The problem lies in the imbalance of our temporary education. In the supremacy of one time over the other; in our confusion between the urgent and the important.

We will always have opportunities within our reachbut only if we know how to discover them (and it’s not easy, since everything requires training) we will be able to grab the lock of hair from Kairos’s head on the fly.