Moments Are Experiences of Time
A minute is sixty seconds and an hour is sixty minutes no matter where I am or what I am doing. However, my experience of sixty seconds or sixty minutes is quite different depending on where and how I am. If I am at home, in bed, asleep, sixty minutes seems like no time at all, but if I am outside on a cold night without enough clothing to keep me warm, then sixty minutes seems like much longer. There is the never changing measurement of time, but there is also how we experience it.
We can’t experience a minute, feel an inch, or taste a gram. They are all measurements. Albert Camus gives some simple ways to become aware of the difference between time experienced and time measured,
By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.
Recognizing the difference between lifetime and the time of life is a huge step toward increasing our quality of life. For this wisdom, sages abound. Rory Sutherland is an advertising guru and an expert in types of time. Rory’s group and a group of engineers were asked to improve the train ride from London to Paris which takes about six hours. The engineers met and came up with a plan to build new and improved tracks from London to the coast at a cost of over nine billion dollars. Rory did not focus on the time of the ride but the experience of time on the ride. His solution was, “Hire all of the world’s top male and female supermodels and pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus. After you pay for the super models and the red wine, you’d still have five billion dollars left, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.” The engineers were limited by an understanding of time only as something measured but not experienced. Rory understood them as two different types of time. He also understood that for most of us, just speeding up won’t make our lives better.
Because the English languages focuses largely on precise measurements, our understanding of time in English shows little distinction between minutes and moments. The dictionary reduces moments to small or miniscule amounts of time. The example of moment used in a sentence is, “I’ll be there in a moment.” In other words, “I’ll be there very soon, in a matter of seconds.” Like the definition of church that limits it to measureable boundaries as a building where worship services are held, so does our understanding of a moment as a miniscule amount of time confine it to minutes or seconds. To understand as well as live our moments, we have to think beyond our limiting English dictionary definitions seeing moments as far more than minutes.
Moments Can Be Holy
Genesis 2: Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. 2 And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
Rabbi Heschel helped me again explore the limits of my understanding of time. In this excerpt, he distinguishes between regular time and holy moments in, The Sabbath,
One of the most distinguished words in the Bible is the word kadosh (קדושׁ), holy; a word which more than any other is representative of the mystery and majesty of the divine. Now what was the first holy object in the history of the world? Was it a mountain? Was it an altar?
It is, indeed, a unique occasion at which the distinguished word kadosh is used for the first time: in the Book of Genesis at the end of the story of creation. How extremely significant is the fact that it is applied to time: “And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” There is no reference in the record of creation to any object in space that would be endowed with the quality of holiness.
This is a radical departure from accustomed religious thinking. The mythical mind would expect that, after heaven and earth have been established, God would create a holy place–a holy mountain or a holy spring–whereupon a sanctuary is to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first.
When history began, there was only one holiness in the world, holiness in time…
Moments Can Touch Eternity
Greek, like Hebrew, has a broader understanding of time than English. The Greeks had two different words for time, Chronos (χρόνος) and Kairos. (καιρός). Author Sarah Breathnach in Simple Abundance, gives clear insight to these two very different types of time and how we experience them.
Chronos is clocks, deadlines, watches, calendars, agendas, planners, schedules, beepers. Chronos is time at her worst. Chronos keeps track… Chronos is the world’s time. Kairos is transcendence, infinity, reverence, joy, passion, love, the Sacred. Kairos is intimacy with the Real. Kairos is time at her best. …Kairos is Spirit’s time. We exist in chronos. We long for kairos. That’s our duality. Chronos requires speed so that it won’t be wasted. Kairos requires space so that it might be savored. We do in chronos. In kairos we’re allowed to be … It takes only a moment to cross over from chronos into kairos, but it does take a moment. All that kairos asks is our willingness to stop running long enough to hear the music of the spheres.
While those passages I just gave you are rather lengthy, because the ability to see the difference between Chronos and Kairos, Kadosh and regular time, moments and minutes, is so important I encourage you to read those passages again and then pay attention to your experiences of both. If you feel rushed, like an athlete with the ball while the clock ticks away with time running out, or if you feel an even greater anxiety, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and you are watching the sands of your life’s hourglass fade away, then you are experiencing chronos. Not only are you experiencing it, you are controlled by it. If you feel alive, free from worry, time is your doorway to a greater reality, free from what might be to simply be present in what is, then you are experiencing kairos. T.S. Eliot wrote of life experienced in kairos when he wrote touching eternity,
Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.
Time as a space, as a noun, as a commodity can never reach the fullness of time beyond space, beyond nouns to verbs, beyond buying and selling to living and loving as Henry Van Dykes noted,
Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice; but for those who love, time is eternity.
