In 1765, Joseph Priestly published the first timeline, giving us the image of time as a line.

Isaac Newton (1643-1747) bestowed on us an understanding of time as linear and absolute, independent from space, and this is what most of the modern world understands to be “time.”

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) then bent our reality and introduced a concept of time that was relative and connected to space, however it remains elusive to most of us.

Soren Kierkegaard lived one hundred years before Einstein, though, and said that “man is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.” He goes on to say that “So also in the eternal there is no division into the past and the future.”

Even the ancients had two concepts of time. 

The Greek word “kairos” refers to the qualitative nature of time, and “chronos” refers to time that could be measured or quantified. Kairos refers to a moment pregnant with possibility.

Ancient Hebrews believed that we are longer than our lifetime because of the legacies we carry within us of those who have gone before in our lineage.

Perhaps similar to the Greek understanding of Kairos, Henri Bergson (1859-1941) argued that time has two faces. The first face of time is “objective time”: the time of watches, calendars, and train timetables. The second, la durée (“duration”), is “lived time,” the time of our inner subjective experience. This is time felt, lived, and acted.

I am fascinated by Kairos, or la durée, or what some may call quantum time or Einstein time. The qualitative experience of time. 

Within this understanding of time, possibility is present. The eternal meets the temporal. The past and the present melt into the deep now.

What is your experience of time? Do you sense the possibility before you at any given moment? 

Love,

Audrey