The Ancient Greeks distinguished between elapsed time, perceived time and eternity.
Let's begin with chronos (χρόνος) – measurable, sequential time. This is the closest to elapsed time in the modern scientific sense. Chronos is quantitative, continuous, divisible time, progressing in a linear fashion from past through present into the future, measurable in years, seasons, months, weeks, days and hours. Chronos was used for tracking celestial cycles in astronomy, for marking events in history, and for everyday scheduling. Chronos is not an independent entity, but a measure of change, without change, there is no time to count. This aligns with modern physics – time is a parameter that indexes change in a system, in particular, entropy – the time it takes for example for an ice cube to melt, for milk to dissolve into coffee or a strawberry to decay into mush. The inexorable progression from order into disorder.
Then we have kairos (καιρός) – qualitative, experienced time. It cannot be measured with a clock; it is felt, not counted. This corresponds to the notions of perceived or opportune time. Kairos is not something to be measured or quantified; it is entirely context-dependent. It can feel fast or slow. Floyd Dixon puts it thus: "We was having so much fun/Didn't know it was half past one/I turned around to have one more/Looked at the clock and it was half past four." On the other hand, after holding the plank posture for four minutes, the fifth minute takes what feels like an hour to pass. Kairos is also the moment when something ought to happen. In Greek rhetoric it was the right moment to present the clinching argument. In warfare, the decisive instant to strike. As such, kairos is linked in meaning to opportunity or decision – and the intuition to act. I would put this as the moment of aligned flows; when your flow and the Cosmic flow are congruent. It is the 'now-or-never' moment; the 'sliding-door' moment. Kairos maps directly onto modern psychological notions of subjective time dilation/ compression, flow states and the emotional weighting of moments.
And finally, the Greeks had the notion of Aion (αἰών) – eternal or cyclical time. This is unbounded time, associated with the lifespan of the cosmos. Aion is not sequential in the everyday sense, but is often cyclical or timeless, associated with permanence or totality. Plato defines chronos as “a moving image of aion”. Sir Roger Penrose uses the term Aeon to describe one cycle of an endless Big Bangs, cosmic expansions and heat-deaths, from one Big Bang to the next. When the last atom ceases to vibrate, there is no vibration, nothing with which to measure time. Time ceases. Without time, there is no space. And at that instant, the next Big Bang pops up. An eternity of aeons.
And so – where in time is the soul? Seeing 'soul' and 'consciousness' as the same concept but from different historical ages, I would consider the soul as of the aion, the biological body as of chronos, consciously experiencing kairos. Passing through the aeon, chronologically. One lifetime at a time.
This Sunday, the clocks go forward. The realm of chronos, the quantifiable. Yet what we experience is not an arbitrary hour on the clock, but is predicated by our biological reaction to the sun's rising and setting, and all points in between – our circadian rhythm. On Sunday morning, the sun will rise at 06:17, an hour and two minutes later than on Saturday. We will be robbed of an hour's sleep – and this has health implications (hospital admissions for heart attacks spike by 24% in the week after the time change – it was this time last year that my heart attack occurred).
So to prepare for the spring time change, I have been going to bed early (as early as 9pm) for the past four evenings, and waking up shortly after 5am, in other words before sunrise, which today was at 05:27.
The early start is wonderful. I witness the sun rising through the forest next door, and set off for an early pre-breakfast stroll. Early spring, so the young day is full of the year's coiled potential, still waiting to burst open. On an empty stomach (just the one black coffee!) I feel light-headed, alert and alive. An altered state. Quite something! It's sunny, though with a chill wind from the south, a wonderful feeling to be alive and soaking up the qualia.
Kairos suggests that it's later than it is; my early-to-bed, early-to-rise pre-time-change regime has gifted me an additional hour and half of daylight that I could have wasted by waking at seven am. On Saturday night, I go to bed at 9pm and wake up at 6am, having had a normal eight hours' sleep.
In the balance between chronos and kairos lies the balance between quantity and quality.
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