EMERGENCE MAGAZINE, 2024

Meeting Kairos

The Ancient Greeks offered some early language for our experience of time. In their stories, Chronos—old and powerful—oversaw the order and progression of time, and thus the word “chronos” came to represent quantitative time: linear, predictable, and abstracted from the world. Conversely, Kairos, the youthful, wing-footed god of opportunity, expressed the quality of—and possibility within—a given moment. Kairos is timing that the moment itself dictates: an opening in time in the wake of interruption and change.