The ancient Greeks had 2 very different concepts for
time: Kronos, which since the invention of the mechanical clock and Taylorism
has been a compulsion in the West. Time as equal measurable units, time as a
straight line- NOT cyclical, is omnipresent in our metaphors for time. Time
in modern Western culture is a valuable commodity, a limited resource that we
use to accomplish our goals. TIME IS MONEY. We understand and experience time
as the kind of thing that can be spent, budgeted, invested, lost, saved, or wasted. This is not the only way human beings have to conceptualise time; it is tied to
a particular culture. There are still many cultures where time is not experienced
in any of these ways.
The ancient Greeks also had a sense of time called
Kairos- the verticality or density of the personal subjective experience of
each present moment. They applied Kairos to rhetoric and chariot racing- that
opportune moment to intervene and make a point or to pass a rival on the race
track. Einstein reportedly used the Kairos example: the 2 minutes spent saying
goodbye to a loved one as the train is pulling away from the station is a very different
sense of subjective time compared to 2 minutes sitting on a hot stove.
Thank you
for giving me your time. May your remaining time be
quality time, full of meaning.
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