From Chronos to Kairos

on trying, the old ways and a new key

I took all of my entrepreneurial motivational books off the shelf last week and piled them on the floor. The titles “Start Finishing”, “Deep Work”, “One Thing” all stared back at me and I wondered with amusement if Mother Earth ever had to read a motivational book. I mean, she just gets it all done right, without actually having to do or even to try. It’s laughable to think of her sitting in a business webinar beating herself up because she just isn’t trying hard enough. She doesn’t need to be prodded into creativity, she is the living breathing embodiment of creation which ironically sometimes does not look like much is happening. She knows when to be fallow and rest and when it is time to move into growth. It is instinctual, not something she read in a Stephen Covey book.

If we are going to move beyond our old capitalistic, colonized, post modern ways of being, we have to accept fully and completely that the old ways are dead – the key no longer fits the lock. In fact, my loves, the universe has changed the locks entirely.

There was a time in the not-so-long-ago past that I was on the “trying” train. I have spent almost all of my life (40+ years) as a highly performative, highly successful, make-things-happen kind of gal. My financial coach once told me I was the only client she ever had who actually did all the assignments and did everything I said I was going to do. I was really good at pushing, molding and contorting myself and the world around me to make things happen. In grad school, I received the graduation title of “most likely to go above and beyond” complete with a certificate.

But as my unbecoming and unmaking have unfolded over the past two years, this has ceased to be true or even remotely possible. It is just no longer accessible and what is becoming abundantly clear is that the old way of doing things no longer works. I do not think I am alone in experiencing this. Collective shifts are happening, upgrades are being received and they are bringing us to a place spiritually, energetically, and psychologically where trying no longer works. 

Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash

And yet everywhere I look I see humanity continuing to apply the same old model of checklists, motivational podcasts, inspirational quotes, spreadsheets, daily planners, manifestation meditations, self help books and yes, just one more breathing exercise to our creativity and our spiritual awakening – all in the name of trying harder to get to where we want to be and trying to force how quickly or slowly something should happen. If we are going to move beyond our old capitalistic, colonized, post modern ways of being, we have to accept fully and completely that the old ways are dead – the key no longer fits the lock. In fact, my loves, the universe has changed the locks entirely. 

Trying for me has come to be just another version of powering over, working and efforting to make the world as I want it to be rather than accepting and moving into surrender of how it is. I am done trying to power over things, people, my environment, and even myself. The question then becomes if powering over does not work and is no longer desired, how do we begin to access powering with. For me, powering with is foreign and not something that I have been shown how to do. Cognitively I can wrap my brain around it but it does not translate into an embodied experience at all (even grammar check does not like me typing powering with and wants to correct it). Powering over is baked into our culture and our collective psyche. How do I begin to forsake powering over the environment around me and turn my attention to powering with – with Spirit, with my own soul and with others.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

If I take this into my somatic experience, I feel the powering over version of trying in the outer edges of my body — in my feet plodding forward, in my legs pushing up out of a squat that the weight of the world on my shoulders has forced me into, in my neck holding that weight and trying to not “lose my head”, in my jaws clenching to bear the strain and constant onslaught of abuse from the world around me. I know this feeling well, it is built into my anatomically thick strong thighs and stone-hard neck and shoulders. This does not feel like a place of creation but of enduring, of holding on for dear life and of getting through by the “skin of my teeth.” I now know it will never be the place from which creation emerges.

But, if lean into the somatic feeling of power with, it is very different. I feel it in my core - in the spiritual fire of Manipura sparking to life, in the heart opening of Anahata to give and receive, in the uprightness of the central channel of Sushumna moving the prana of life. For me, it feels nothing like trying. It feels like being. Soft, open, fluid, unknown and unbound. The complete opposite of all my soul has been conditioned to culturally for many lifetimes. My body and soul have been forged in this blueprint time and time again. So much so that I cannot tell the difference between the two without doing one thing — slowing down.

This has been the answer for me, the new key if you will (at least as of today). Slowing down enough to feel into what it’s even like to BE — to sync my own natural rhythm with that of Spirit and Nature, to power with the Divine that moves in and through all things including you and I. To actually feel the sands of time passing through my hands. To feel the seasons change and watch the spider weave her web.

Some call this Kairos, or Spirit time, which is in direct contrast to Chronos or what I call “matter time”. As a species, we had moved as far away from the rhythm and pace of Spirit as I think we possibly can. We had become enslaved to the ever marching God of time, Chronos. I say “had” because I believe that pandemic began to dissolve the illusion of Chronos that had been cast over us all like a net, trapping us into believing we are enslaved to it. This illusion, fueled by capitalistic, performative based constructs and thinking, is beginning to flicker like a glitch in the matrix. And it is not hard to see that it no longer serves. It does not serve our spiritual evolution as humanity. It does not serve the expansion of our consciousness. And it certainly does not serve our movement toward unity. 

I personally have a long way to go to shift the internal clock of my mind, body and soul to Kairos but I am learning. My greatest teachers are nature, my creative callings in the world and others who are stepping onto the path of Kairos. So far, I am learning that there is A LOT of waiting involved. Humans are not good wait-ers. We want what we want when we want it and how we want it. Day in and day out this is reinforced by the instant gratification of consumerism, media and information at our fingertips. 

I have also learned there is no trying in Kairos – there is only surrender, there is listening, there is stepping off the cliff into the great abyss of the unknown, there is allowing my Self to dis-solve and dis-member. We are being called into a new way of being as a species that can best be described by the Daoist teaching of Wei Wu Wei, doing not doing (more on this next week!). As my understanding of this way of being grows, I can see that this is not laziness, it is not a laissez-faire attitude, but rather a knowing when to effort and when not to effort, finding that beautiful balance between effort and relaxation, between contraction and expansion, between destruction and creation.

Photo by Kunj Parekh on Unsplash

My biggest teacher right now is my relationship with writing my memoir. I am re-writing the old stories — taking “I am trying to write my memoir” and turning it completely on its head. My memoir is writing me. She is calling me to step into spirit time and flow with what is wanting to move in and through me. To move as a weaver of a story with the thread unfurling from some place beyond me. There is no contraction and effort in becoming a hollow bone that story, truth and Spirit can move through, in fact the opposite is true. This for me is the challenge, trusting the process and each day stepping into the flow of Kairos. 

This shift from Chronos to Kairos is a massive undertaking and I truly believe our best allies are going to be patience, trust and the practice of deep listening. Listening for the rhythms of our own hearts and the vibration of our soul. And the strange irony of it all is that we day in and day out place our feet on the very Goddess who does this effortlessly. We are sitting right on top of the blueprint, the curriculum if you will — Mother Earth. She holds the key to the new way of being, of not efforting but surrendering to the flow.

It will not change overnight, dear ones, or perhaps even in a generation or two but change it must. The definition of insanity (not sound) is continuing to do the same thing and thinking we will get a different outcome. We are being called to step out of the insanity of Chronos, the synthetic illusion of sound and rhythm, and into the sanity of Kairos, the beautiful chaotic sound of life. It is time to do it differently.