In 40 Years Time
With 40 has come a different understanding of time than I’ve ever experienced before. I crave the slowness of a day–watching the afternoon sun shift its course through my windows as the minutes move by. It might take a month to notice the difference, but each day where the light touches changes just a little and exposes a bit of something it hadn’t the day before. Lots of teeny tiny movements eventually compounded into a noticeable impact.
I want to be both open handed and protective with my time. It feels like I’m aggressively holding it loosely.
Let me hit you with some deep wisdom: Things take time. Good things take more time.
This didn’t blow your mind, I know. But if you’re anything like me, sometimes I need reminders of simple truths to unencumber my overactive and complex mind. I need to come back down to earth, to what’s true, to plant my feet firmly in the grass and start there. The rest is often just distracting, overwhelming noise. Or hot air pushing my balloon too far out of the atmosphere of reality in a pretty unhelpful, on the verge of dangerous, way.
I have to come back to this over
and over
and
over again.
It’s both comically uncomplicated and agonizingly abstruse.
As I get older, I find myself living in the tension of kairos and chronos. Chronos time–the time that is linear and lost, never to get back. Kairos time–the time that is a propitious moment. The season, the opportunity, the pressing urge to do that one thing and to do it now. Kairos is a being in tune with the present to find unexpected, profound, and even divine disruptions to our chronos driven existences.
In approaching and turning 40, I’ve reflected on where I am, where I’ve wanted to be (and am not), where I’d like to go, and how much and how little control I have in it all. No one is getting younger (a very strange reality check at this milestone birthday) and death is inevitable (all things live and die, but wow, it does really end).
Chronos rules our western, individualistic world. If I’m gauging the contentment of my life or the determinants of “success” and worthiness from societal standards, it misses the mark. At least in a chronos-centric context.
But that’s a shallow and terribly uninteresting way to reflect on these past 40 years. You see, the invitation is to orient myself to kairos, and to acknowledge all of the ways I’ve said yes to the rich and wonderful moments I’ve been gifted.
My cup overflows.
The people. Perspectives. Passion and pain. Facing fears and deep breaths. Taking risks and exploring new places. Creating and cultivating. Learning and listening and loving and letting go. Unexpected conversations. Curious connections. An a-ha or haha when it wasn’t anticipated. The right music, the bit of magic, firelight and sunshine and expansive seas and glacier lakes. Kairos is little. Kairos is so very large.
I tap into kairos often over a cup of coffee–shared with someone else or on my own. It’s a ritual that interrupts my routine. It’s a reminder of taking a beat and seeing what the present pause might hold. You see, although it’s a ritual, I don’t have it at the same time everyday. Sometimes it’s a morning cup at home, slow coffee meticulously hand poured. These days it’s usually a walk to my favorite coffee shop (shoutout to Stereoscope) to get me out of the house and into the beauty of where I live and meaningful interactions with baristas turned friends.
It’s a felt decision, spontaneous in the choosing, and grounding in the doing.
Like diving into 49° water at Avalanche Lake in Montana a couple of weeks ago. It was my very first hike post-injury and I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t worried about it (it being the hike, my knee, pain, saying yes to 6.5 miles). My family glamped along Tobacco River with no electricity and the only flushing toilet being an uphill walk away. It was a stunning property, with cabins perched cliffside and an airstream and A-frame tucked down by the waterfront within feet of spawning salmon and a hundred cows on pasture.
It was a solid hour and forty minute drive one way to Glacier National Park (the reason for visiting Montana in the first place) and over the course of our 4 days there, we had to be strategic in where we went and how we spent the time. There were, after all, a total of 5 recent knee surgeries, 4 work-tired brains, 3 careful food intakers, and 1 parasite named Pari (pronounced Perry naturally) to consider in the adventures. We were all thrilled to be there, though, and despite the very real physical challenges, the trip was brimming with individual and collective time in kairos. It was palpable.
The hike to the lake was one of those many moments. I found myself being pulled toward it, the water teasing me with its pristine beauty and quiet cold. If there is water, I must go in. I need to be immersed, awakened by the cold or hugged by the warmth. I want to glide under the surface, opening my eyes to the blurry blue mysterious world below, pulling myself forward and deeper until I have to go up, but only just long enough to take a breath, and go back under.
Everything changes in water. Sound, speed, gravity, light, movement are altered. Muffled, slow, weightless, refraction–water is a powerful element.
I know it’s not for everyone, but I live for water. I’d like to think it’s the approximately 60% of myself being made up of it and longing to find a way back to itself…but I don’t think it’s quite that deep.
Honestly? It’s probably because getting into water feels so different from being on land. It turns into an unexpected disruption to an ordinary day. It wakes me up. It calms me down. I’m surrounded and surrendered at the same time.
Water is to be respected.
It had been years (and I’m talking 5+ years) since I’ve swam in an alpine lake tucked into the mountains. There’s nothing like the reward of stripping out of sweaty hiking clothes for a refreshing (or more accurately, brisk) dip.
At Avalanche Lake in 49° water, I experienced renewal. And I likely overstayed my welcome, swimming long enough that shivers followed me halfway down the trail back, but boy, was it worth it.
Swimming beneath a cloudy blue sky and towering mountain peaks with 4 waterfalls cascading down, there was no doubt in my mind that not only was I alive, but I was actually living.
Kairos.
Birthdays matter to me. I like that there is a marker in time, which is very chronos I know, every 365 days (or 366; thanks leap year) where I am reminded that I’ve lived another cycle around the sun. I am reminded that I’ve lived.
And it matters that in celebrating my birthday I can share it with others, not in a way that focuses the attention on me unnecessarily. Rather it’s a chance to experience kairos together, which to me feels more profound when shared.
This year is nothing like I expected it to be.
I’ve been defeated.
Exhausted.
Lonely.
Sad.
In agonizing pain.
Afraid.
And yet I’ve also tapped into a resilience and commitment to healing, even in the face of terrifying obstacles, that I didn’t realize was within me. Only in looking back over the past 7 months since my knee injury have I caught a glimpse of this.
It mostly just looked like saying yes, one minute at a time. Lots of teeny tiny movements eventually compounded into a noticeable impact.
Noticeable impact: I’m walking fairly normally, hiking 6.5 miles even?! I surfed 5 days in Mexico on my birthday trip with close friends. Nevermind it was a soft top and my popup was as graceful as a drunk pegleg pirate slopping around its ship in a storm. The point is, I surfed. Wednesday I got discharged from physical therapy. This was the place I visited and the people that I saw more than my friends and family. Cheerleaders and coaches, pushing me to my limits and a little beyond, which brings me to now in my knee journey, now where my doctor enthusiastically says he’s “overjoyed” with the progress of my knee, a word I never imagined hearing from him about my recovery.
There’s still a long way to go, but it takes time. Chronos time.
Things take time. Good things take more time.
And I’ve also come a long way. Much further than I ever thought I would by this point.
Kairos is illuminating just how much.
No, getting to 40 didn’t look like what I wanted or what I thought when I was younger or even at the beginning of 2024. A lot sucked. A lot still sucks.
But a lot was good, too. Give it a little more time, and it will be really good.
The last 40 years were unbelievable, bursting with fullness, laced with twists and turns—markers of a good life adventure. Now, just think of what 40 more could hold.
Existing in chronos, open to kairos.
In learning and with love,
Lindsey
(Your now 40 year old friend)