“At the still point of the turning world... there the dance is.”— T.S. Eliot The other day I scrolled past a fearmonger-y clickbait headline that said "Earth is Spinning Faster Than Ever and Time is Literally Slipping Away." Great thing to tell a woman nigh on 35 years, who is -according to the medical world - about to plunge into the dark and immediate world of geriatrics and "advanced maternal age". One minute you're vibing with your collagen and ability to stay up past 10pm, and the next you're being told that both the planet and your eggs are in a race against time. Coolcoolcool. Internet, I beg of you, PLEASE chill. At first, I thought this was fake news, but it turns out it's actual science. In recent years, the Earth is rotating ever so slightly faster causing days to be slightly shorter. These changes are imperceptible, we're talking milliseconds, but for some reason I can't help feeling a little ripped off. Maybe I'm greedy, but I want more life, more time, more milliseconds. It feels a bit like a Truman Show moment; I looked behind the curtain and accidentally saw the gears turning - a crack in the illusion that exposes that time is simply made up. My awareness of this infinitesimal speed-up along with my 35th birthday this week could have the power to send me into a minor tailspin, or I could choose to let this serve as a reminder that I get to decide how I live inside time. I can choose to despair or delight. And I choose delight. What a wonderful thing that time is literally a construct! Women especially are conditioned to believe that time is slipping away; guided by arbitrary markers tied to age, fertility, beauty, success. But what if those markers aren’t truth, just tradition? And what if our path is not linear, but cyclical? And what if the real currency of time is not these traditional markers, but presence, joy, meaning? The Greeks had something right by distinguishing between Chronos time and Kairos time. Chronos is sequential, measurable, linear. Wrapped up in the business of milliseconds and calendars and construct. Kairos is about the ideal moment. The soul time. Chronos time is eggs for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and protein, veg, and starch for dinner in the morning, midday, and evening respectively. Kairos time is eating whatever you feel like whenever your body tells you it’s hungry. Kairos time happens when you go to a friend’s house and don’t even notice that it’s dark out and you’ve been there for eight hours. Kairos time is when you're in flow state working on something that makes you feel alive in the best way. Kairos time is that new-parent blur where you're somehow simultaneously the busiest you've ever been while not being sure what you did all day, lost in the timeless rhythm of feeding, sleeping, and staring at tiny fingers and toes. Kairos time is the way grief draws an invisible line between the “before” and the “after”. It's ceremony time. Where an "I do" isn't about the seconds it takes to say, but the lifetime it contains. The rules of time fade away and in its place we are left with pure being. Ceremony helps take us out of Chronos time and into Kairos time. Marking our timeline, our moments, our meaning instead of the ones prescribed to us. The earth may be spinning faster, but the moments that matter most exist outside of that frantic, urgent Chronos energy. They exist in the pause, the breath, the recognition that some things can't be hurried or scheduled, they can only be witnessed and held. Yes, I know I live in the world and can't simply abandon Chronos time. Deadlines, minutes, schedules, and calendars persist. I’ll turn 35 on the 4th regardless of whether or not I acknowledge a calendar. But I feel grateful to be doing this work that allows me to live, if even for a moment, in Kairos time. Paying attention to intuition, rhythm, and meaning. Standing at these thresholds alongside others as we pause time, hold time, mark time. Also, let’s be real, 35 is young. Everything is relative. I know people who say their 40s, 50s, and 60s have been the most liberating, joy-filled, grounded decades of their lives. Aging isn't a countdown to disappearance, it's a privilege, a slow unveiling, a deepening, a becoming. We gain wisdom, confidence, and a keener sense of what truly matters. I want more time not because I’m afraid of growing older, but because I love that with each passing year I feel more and more like me. And so in these days before my birthday you can find me here; feet planted in my own tide, the moon tugging gently at the shore, while the Earth spins infinitesimally faster.
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