I love watches. I typically wear 2-5 different ones in a day. Yeah. Crazy. I change them to suit my moods. Today I began with a simple, beautiful Timex, stainless steel 38mm case with a white face with black hands and numbers, held on by a great thick reddish brown strap with a small touch of light blue stitching near the lugs. Pictured below is the next one up, the Gerald Genta (pronounced "Zheeral Zhenta"), seconds before I changed into it. GG was by most estimates the great watch designer of the 20th century, creating the Constellation for Omega, the Royal Oak for Audemars, the Nautilus for Patek, and on and on. Then he formed his own company and made wild nonstandard watches, like the jump hour, where the hour numeral would pop into a window, and a horseshoe of minute numbers with one standard hand indicating them kept you apprised of how that hour was progressing. Sometimes both the hour and minutes would jump. My GG sports watch here on a rubber strap (with his name in raised letters in the rubber) is the only watch he made that was "normal" - nonstandard for him among his nonstandard designs, looking like a regular watch but with the numbers configured to allude to the jump hour versions. Steel fluted 38mm case, domed and beaded crown, carbon fiber dial—all sorts of idiosyncratic details adorning an ordinary looking watch. But it's special to those who know.
And now, with that lead in, my topic: The Greeks had two words for time, chronos which meant normal clock time, watch time, your smart but not wise phone time, and what leads to the calendar, the increments of seconds, minutes, hours, and days that pass the same for all regardless of how we experience them. Then there is kairos, a very special time, maybe a sacred time, a unique thread that weaves through the world, behind the scenes, and if you can pick it up and respond to it, you find unusual synchronicity, special coincidences, you meet with unusual successes helped along by unseen forces. That person comes into your life, that thing happens just when it's needed, whether you realized the need in advance or not.
There is a statement in the New Testament, in Galatians I think: "When the time had fully come, God sent forth his son." If I recall, the term here is one ordinarily used for a pregnant woman ready to give birth. It's a concept of readiness, or fullness. When the everyone is running around doing things too soon or late, the person with a keen sense of kairos does them at the perfect time, the Goldilocks time, and succeeds. Most of us just do when we do and hope for the best. And often we have to be patient because the best will happen in the kairos time, not in the chronos time, the clock time or calendar time we have in mind. Faith, hope, love, and the culmination of them in patience are required to get us to the kairos. So be of good hope. Seek the special, unusual, unique kairos, which I see alluded to in my old Gerald Genta watch, the one that tells me it's now kairos time to stop.
