Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time [kairos].
– Ephesians 5:15-16

Something miraculous happened during the pandemic: nearly overnight, our schedules cleared, wiped clean like a slate. Time lost its meaning—or rather, its meaning changed.

The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is clock-time, time in compartments, time marked by a series of events. Kairos is time marked by moments of significance. David Brooks writes about experiencing the latter in nature: “The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer. Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment . . . The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.”

The pandemic forced us to experience less chronos-time and more kairos-time, and many were the unexpected discoveries we made. We experienced new hobbies or renewed old ones. We spent more time in nature. We took trips. We did more as family units: ate meals, pieced together puzzles, played games. We processed emotions; we thought more about the world. Our lives were lived a bit more qualitatively, more in terms of significant moments of experience, discovery, grief, anguish, reflection.

And now, particularly with the school year beginning and activities ramped back up, our calendar is filling. Chronos-time is coming back with a vengeance, an experience of time in the random, short segments my friend once dubbed “confetti-time.” With four kids in different age groups, this feels almost impossible to avoid. Take school runs, the most basic of events. The other night, I charted out all the kids’ school pick-up and drop-off schedules, which differ by grade and by day of the week. There are days when I have three different pickup times, spaced fifteen to thirty minutes apart (I think I’ve only forgotten to pick up a child once, which is pretty good). 

That’s the confetti life: a constant movement from one activity to another, with only short breaks in between. Time becomes quantitative, not qualitative. The thing is, now I know the kind of kairos moments I’m missing out on. And I don’t want to forget that; I don’t want to forget the good things about inhabiting a dimension of time that exists outside the tyranny of the clock. I don’t want to become so myopic that I’m not able to discern the insights and movements of God that so often occur outside of our calibrations.

In the end, we must have both. As Nouwen puts it, “time [is] not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God’s good work in us . . . To start seeing that the many events of our day, week, or year are not in the way of our search for a full life but rather the way to it is a real experience of conversion.” God works precisely through our daily experiences, some of which are necessarily, and healthily, scheduled. But to allow time to begin to speak to us of God, and not run our lives, we must also have spaces for kairos-time. For lingering with friends, for extended time in solitude or nature, for unplanned conversations with our children, for hobbies that bring out different sides of ourselves, simply for rest. We’ve brainstormed some ways to do this, not all of which may work, but the point is that, as our schedules are filling up, this is something worth paying attention to.