Welcome the Passing of Time
What does the winter solstice have to teach us about slowing down and savoring each moment?
“When you can welcome the passing of time like an old friend”
Tonight, December 21, marks the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere - the winter solstice.
I’ve never paid too much attention to this day before. Like all days that lead up to the holidays and New Years, I usually feel a flurry of activity and stress. Time seems to be going faster than ever. My instinct is to move fast alongside of it. Slowing down feels unnatural and restrictive.
And yet… tonight I sit with my notebook and a simple candle next to me. I ask myself: is this the relationship with time that I want? To always feel it is out of my reach, going faster than I can keep up, and that there simply is never enough time.
But as I prepare myself to turn the page of another year, I realize I want to practice relating with time differently. I’m no longer satisfied feeling the scarcity that there simply isn’t enough time.
I long to experience time as a gift that expands my life, rather than diminishing it.
The ancient Greeks had a word that represents our different experiences of time.
Chronos measures time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, years etc. This is the word which measures Quantity of time.
Kairos measures time in the best moments of life, it measures the Quality of time. It does not measure Minutes but it measures moments. The most beautiful, right, magical and opportune moments. It is a more subjective experience of life.
The best analogy I’ve come across is to think of Chronos as a flowing river that carries us away and Kairos as a quiet lake in which we can choose to swim in.
We need Chronos time to measure the minutes, hours, and days of our life. But Kairos is the choice we make to be so deeply engrossed in an activity that time seems to stand still.
In Chronos, we are stressed—in Kairos, we are refreshed.
My hope for all of us, is that as we cross this threshold into a new season, we can allow ourselves to relax. We can invite the passing of time as a reliable friend without feeling like we have to rush alongside of it. We can spend a night in quiet contentment with the light of a candle and feel OK as another night passes.
We don’t need to always be carried away by the river of Chronos time - but we can sometimes choose to take a dip in the lake of Kairos. We can absorb ourselves in the moment and let time stand still.
We can know that this moment is enough. We can trust that with each moment ahead, we are expanding our life rather than diminishing it.
This week's sketchbook prompt:
Explore your own relationship with time. Take a sketchbook and set a timer for one minute. Draw a circle for every second that passes. Then do this again without a timer, and simply draw a circle for every breath you take. Notice the difference in these two approaches and how you experienced time passing.
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A note from Rukmini–
Dear friend, if you’ve made it all the way down here - thank you! I am excited to say that I am planning to restart my weekly newsletter again (at least for the winter season). I will be using Substack to write and share. You can see my full archive list here.