Without time, everything would happen at once!

THE WISDOM OF AGING KRONOS & KAIROS THE ARROW OF TIME

THE WISDOM OF AGING

Impatience is an immature understanding of how the world works. Trees don't pop out of the ground with leaves receptive to sunlight and fruit ready to eat. People don't pop out of the womb fully grown and prepared to function as mature, interdependent adults. Being patient isn't being fearful or indecisive. It's respecting time.

The busyness of life can distract us from things that bring us deep-down, long-lasting happiness. The happiness that comes from having something won't be as deep or as lasting as the happiness that comes from being someone who matters. The balance between having and being can feel like a precarious teetering and tottering, but you can balance the having and being by making wise choices about priorities. Work matters, for example, and sometimes you must put it ahead of things that matter more than getting to work. Just remember to kiss your loved ones good bye before you rush out the door. Remember to balance things that bring outer happiness with things that nourish inner happiness.

So it can take years to shift our attention from things that bring shallow, short-term happiness to things that bring deep, long-lasting happiness. Transforming a menial job into a meaningful career, for example, or finding someone who reciprocates your love for them with their love for you. Neither of those changes happen overnight. As we mature, however, we get better at postponing gratification. If your life were condensed into one day, the morning would be when you are young. The afternoon would be when you are middle aged. And the evening would be when you retire.

Mornings

When we are young, the mornings of our life have not yet seen the afternoons. We want things now, and tend to focus those wants on things outside ourselves:

Getting our first car, scoring our first touchdown, our first kiss;
Getting our high school diploma so we can get into college;
Getting a college degree so we can get a job that gets us money;
Getting married, buying a house and having children.

Afternoons

When we are middle-aged, the afternoons of our life have seen the mornings, but not the evenings. We still tend to focus our attention on things outside ourselves, but our approach to the business and busyness of life begins to mature:

Our sense of purpose compels us to replace a menial job with a meaningful career;
Our work for a promotion to give our family a better life;
We invest part of your income to support our retirement;
We put money aside to pay for our children's college education;
We struggle to find time for our family and our leisure activities;

EVENINGS

When you retire you begin to appreciate what the mornings and afternoons of your life did not foresee. You begin to shift your attention away from things outside yourself toward things inside yourself. You begin to enjoy the happiness that comes from within as much or more than the happiness that comes from things outside. You begin to see that happiness is like moonshine. If you make your own you'll never run out.

Physical health and mental well being so you can enjoy your Golden Years;
Pleasures of loving friends and family more than yourself;
Peace with who you are; being comfortable in the skin you're in;
Satisfying relationships with family, friends, God, country, home and Earth.

KRONOS & KAIROS

Kronos is the quantitative measure of minutes. Kairos is the qualitative measure of moments. Kronos is the chronological movement of time—a river that carries us from one minute to the next. Kairos is the absence of time—a lake in which we float with no thought of the passage of time.

We experience Kronos when we are at work watching the clock. We experience Kairos when we are so deeply engrossed in an activity, a beautiful sunset, the smile of a love one, watching the stars and reflecting on your place in this vast universe that time seems to stand still. In chronos we are stressed. In Kairos we are refreshed. We never seem to get enough Kronos time, but less Kronos time means less work whereas more Kairos time means more living.

Kairos is the Greek god of opportunity. Every time we step out of chronos time and into kairos time we open ourselves to life-changing adventures, awakenings and opportunities. Kairos time is the right moment, the opportune moment. But don't think Kronos is bad and kairos is good—they are two sides of the same coin. The better you can deal with chronos the more prepared you are for taking advantage of kairos. Kronos is linear, sequential time—the deterministic march of Father Time . Kairos is circular, numinous time—the opportunistic moments of Creative Time

Chronos is old Father Time looking back at what was.
Kairos is young Numinous Time looking forward to what

THE ARROW OF TIME

Physics equations work equally well whether time is moving forward into the future (positive time) or backward into the past (negative time.) However, time in the natural world has one direction, called the arrow of time. The question of why time is irreversible is one of the biggest unresolved questions in science.

One explanation is that the natural world follows the laws of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that within an isolated system, the entropy of the system remains constant or increases. If the universe is considered to be an isolated system, its entropy (degree of disorder) can never decrease. In other words, the universe cannot return to exactly the same state in which it was at an earlier point. Time cannot move backward.

The idea of traveling back in time, however, poses problems. One issue is causality or cause and effect. Causes lead naturally to effects, we remember the past but not the future and the evolution of time appears to be continuous and irreversible. Moving back in time could cause a temporal paradox. The "grandfather paradox" is a classic example. According to the paradox, if you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before your mother or father was born, you could prevent your own birth. Many physicists believe time travel to the past is impossible, but there are solutions to a temporal paradox, such as traveling between parallel universes or branch points.

Isaac Newton assumed that time was absolute, that all observers could agree on the exact same moment of time regardless of where they were in the world, or the universe. But Einstein discovered that the passage of time is relative. In his theory of special relativity, he demonstrated that moving clocks run slowly; the faster you move in space, the more slowly you progress through time. And the closer you get to the speed of light, the greater this effect becomes. The result is that two observers cannot agree on simultaneous events. This can be understood by the diagram below.

On the left, a train carriage is shown with a person, Alice, inside. Alice turns on a light in the middle of the carriage and observes light beams arriving at the two ends of the carriage at the same time, T2. On the right we see the scenario from Bob's point on view on the platform as the train moves past with velocity v. He sees the two light beams emitted at the same time, just like Alice. However, because the train is moving to the right, the rear of the train intercepts the leftward light first, at time T1 < T2. Meanwhile, the light takes a little longer to strike the front of the train, which it does at time T3 > T1. So from Bob's perspective, the events which Alice saw to be simultaneous occur one after the other.