The sign on inside the Bora Bora dockside office for the ship I was awaiting.
"The boat, she’s here when she’s here.
She’s gone when she’s gone."
Some attribute to Einstein this quote (it's his quote), but still it has a certain charm.
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” ... and that describes kairos.
The Ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronoa, the time we can measure, it is linear, and kairos, the time we experience internally that expands and contracts, some call it soul time.
Chronos, linear time, the 60 minutes in an hour time is quite familiar.
Kairos is the other ancient Greek word for time...
Kairos The opportune moment.
It is one of two words that the ancient Greeks had for 'time'; the other being chronos (χρόνος). Whereas the latter refers to chronological or sequential time, kairos signifies a proper or opportune time for action.[citation needed] In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.[2] --Wikipedia
In the literature of the classical period, writers and orators used kairos to specify moments when the opportune action was made, often through metaphors involving archery and one's ability to aim and fire at the exact right time on-target. For example, in The Suppliants, a drama written by Euripides, Adrastus describes the ability to influence and change another person's mind by "aiming their bow beyond the kairos." Kairos in general was formulated as a tool to explain and understand the interposition of humans for their actions and the due consequences.[5]
Kairos is also an alternate spelling of the minor Greek deity Caerus, the god of luck and opportunity.[6] --Wikipedia
In Hippocrates' (460–357 BCE) major theoretical treatises on the nature of medical science and methodology, the term kairos is used within the first line. Hippocrates is generally accepted as the father of medicine, but his contribution to the discourse of science is less discussed. While "kairos" most often refers to "the right time," Hippocrates also used the term when referencing experimentation. Using this term allowed him to "express the variable components of medical practice more accurately." Here the word refers more to proportion, the mean, and the implicit sense of right measure.
Hippocrates most famous quote about kairos is "every kairos is a chronos, but not every chronos is a kairos."[22]
The Chronospheric Survey
Step #1 To get a quick score, read each item, make a fast response to each item that represents your true self, by circling a number from 1-10. This is a quick-time-forced-choice inventory. Record your responses on a separate answer sheet (or better yet, in your personal journal. If you don't have one, I invite you to start. This is a great place for you to record your personal life list.
Tally your score (numeric total of your nine responses). To see how the data stacks up, email your score to me, as well as where you grew up.
By the way, you won't find chronosphere, monochronos, or polychronos in the dictionary because I've coined the terms so recently, they haven't had enough time to work their way into every day language.
“Chronemics is the role of time in communication. According to the Encyclopedia of Special Education "Chronemics includes time orientation, understanding and organization; use of and reaction to time pressures; our innate and learned awareness of time; wearing or not wearing a watch; arriving, starting, and ending late or on time."
The way someone values and perceives time plays a considerable role on his or her communication process. The use of time can affect lifestyles, personal relationships, and schooling and work life. Across cultures, people usually have different time perceptions, and this can result in conflicts between individuals. Time perceptions include punctuality, interactions, and willingness to wait. Three main types of time in chronemics are: interactive, conceptual, and social.
Polychronos
"The boat, she’s here when she’s here.
She’s gone when she’s gone."
That’s polychronic. When in Tahiti, that’s pretty much all you need to know about time. The polychronic girl behind the counter might have seen me as monocronos: “wound too tight.” While the Swiss monochronic train employee might have seen my daughter as too lazy to be “on time.”
What is important is the awareness that we easily, and often unkindly judge others because of chronemic differences. I had to learn to be a little more Polynesian, a little more polychronic during my stay in Tahiti.
There was a state road construction project by my long term vacation rental condo on the Big Island of Hawaii. I noticed over the week that the all-Hawaiian crew would wrap up their work at noon, very different from the 8am to 4pm road crews on the mainland. The next day, I asked one of the guys why they left work so early. He eyed me kindly and said: “My friends and I leave work to be with our families. We work just enough to live happily, so we leave at noon because here, we don’t need more money to live well.” They have grown up in a less material society so they "work just hard enough to have plenty of time to play" so to speak. That’s fits into my definition of polychronic.
Learners, also vary in another perhaps more important way, chronospherically, how they navigate time:
