The Greek word for time is kairos, which to them means “a penetrable opening, one through which, in which to create an opportunity. I just love this way of looking at time – worlds apart from 9 to 5, or any of the million ways we’re always chasing after time. When I find myself looking at my watch, I remind myself of kairos. What’s the rush? So what if they don’t get here on time? The space of waiting could be kairos.
I came across a Japanese mantra, “Ichigo, Ichie” or One Time, One Meeting. unprecedented, unrepeatable. When time is viewed this way, it is as close to timeless as there is. When I find myself glazing away, I recite Ichigo, Ichie, and a world always unfolds in front of me when I do.
Carl Jung has this take on time: “In the end, the only events in life worth telling are those in which the imperishable world erupted into this transitory world.”
These thoughts have accompanied me the last few weeks. I go back to a fall plunging 50 feet and having only my right arm to cushion the rest of my body. Some people were quick to infer this was a “wake-up call” to suggest, kindly of course, that there might be some responsibilities I was neglecting or some bad trip I was into that I just needed to stop. I understand this kind of guilt-tripping concern. No, it wasn’t a wake-up call, but rather a “falling into grace.”
Several months after the incident, I am amazed at how the dots get connected to make a meaningful thread out of other seemingly unrelated events. Like the fact that the morning of my fall, I sent an email to a guy whose last name was Resurreccion. Then two days later, in the hospital where I was being treated, it was a Dr. Resurreccion who attended to my needs.
I feel that in a large sense, I could have died in that fall. The thought that the fall was a mystical experience made me alert to living life differently. Not that there was anything wrong with the life before the fall. Except for being a workaholic and forever obsessed with achieving something. This “died” with the fall.
My resurrection consists of finding kairos and Ichigo, Ichie in my daily life. of being vigilant as I watch for the intersection between the world of the imperishable and the million transitory things I tend to be preoccupied with.
