This Post Took 10,000 Heartbeats
Musings on Notions of Time
Time is a precise thing.
We are able to measure down to picoseconds (that’s 10^-12 seconds), and this precision gives us industrial orchestrations that are nothing short of magic.
The computer I'm writing on can run at 3 Gigahertz, that's 3 billion cycles per second.
The plane I'm flying on has jet engine turbines spinning at 20,000 rounds per minute.
All these processes are controlled to such a degree that if my flight across a continent is delayed by even an hour, I would be upset, along with hundreds of other passengers/staff connected to the consequences of such a delay.
Yet, even as we gain profound control of our universe's ticking tocks, we also seem to lose our understanding of time.
The Greeks have several different terms for time, most commonly:
Kronos, the time our mind is familiar with, trickles by with atomic accuracy, second by second, all fungible, and all objectively passing by as the universe ticks forward uncaringly.
Kairos, the "event" time that our body is most familiar with, is a radically different notion that orients from a relative or contextual relationship with time – a subjective experience of time.
Consider the following statements:
"He waited in agony, for what felt like grueling hours, just to wait for the bathroom stall to free up."
"The hours flew by, as both of them lost themselves in the joy of sharing a wonderful date."
"Years slip by, and before she could notice, her daughter has already become a grown young woman."
"We only have one month to deliver on our revenue quota or we won't be able to raise more funding."
"Despite having resolved to wait for at least 20 more minutes, when he looked up again, only a measly 10 minutes had passed. The end to class felt asymptotically far away."
Each of these statements portrays time in rather strange ways. How could years "slip by"? How could hours be "grueling" and "flying by"? Not to mention, one of those is literally claiming minutes as hours – that's simply false!
Yet, it is likely that most of those statements felt perfectly natural to a reader. We should be able to feel in ourselves some corresponding experiences, ones that inform us of how it feels to be in the shoes of the person having the experience.
Which is to say, while the universe may uncaringly pass from one moment to the next, we – the beings experiencing those moments – would experience those moments in relativity.
It's why if someone said: "Man, what's so incredible about 127 hours, I do 127 hours literally every week", we might be at a loss for words.
The two kinds of time, Kronos (objective time) and Kairos (subjective time) are useful for their respective purposes. Their domain roughly corresponds to how physics (and more broadly the natural sciences) understands time and how literature (and more broadly the humanities) understand time.
Mixing up their uses can be comical, dangerous, and perhaps creative too.
Imagine how bizarre it would be if a special forces team, as they get ready to assault an objective, instead of synchronizing by their watches, synchronized by their heartbeat? That is, rather than assault at 0600 hours, we'll assault when everyone has reached 100 heartbeats. That'd be a disaster!
Since everyone experiences time differently, coordinating on subjectivity can be fickle and irritating. We often need to count on objective time to do things together. Imagine if a music band were playing together not by the music's time signature, but just by whatever they feel like, we'd have a disaster again!
... Except, maybe? The time signature of a piece of music may not be pre-agreed on, but that doesn't necessarily prevent a band from triangulating some shared or complementary tempo. It may not be as strict as "the piano teacher who insists you should play exactly by what the sheet says" yet, musicality can nonetheless arise, whether that's in a modern jazz band or a tribal drum circle.
Similarly, the special forces team may not coordinate especially well on an assault based on heartbeat count, but a team that is skilled at synchronizing heartbeats probably gains competency on other fronts, like greater solidarity and emotional intelligence. Despite a vocation built on adversarial violence, elite military units seem to also agree that these competencies are important.
When we can incorporate "measures" of subjective time, we gain additional forms of evaluation and coordination.
Once, when I was in a lecture, I was asked to respond to a question the lecturer asked. As I responded, my heart was pounding against my ribcage, with all the strength of "if I don't answer eloquently, everyone will think I'm a failure!" In the maybe 30 seconds it took to answer the question, I can certainly tell you it didn't feel like 30 seconds. Over time, this changed, in a later, similar circumstance, I was asked a question again, only for 30 seconds to glide on by. I noticed that doing the same thing didn't take as many heartbeats this time. Even though objectively, the same amount of time has passed, it was the difference in heartbeats that measured the "time" that mattered.
Consider the difference between an airport policy that mandates "all vehicle drop-offs have a strict 3-minute goodbye time allowance" versus "all drop-offs have an allowance for 1 eye-gaze worth of time".
What about the difference between starting a meeting within 5 minutes of the scheduled start time versus starting a meeting after 10 deep breaths from the first n-arrivals?
Or how about we assign 10 pieces played with genuine joy rather than 2 hours of practicing an instrument?
Strange as some of these may sound, how dysfunctional would these really be? What would instead be gained as a result? What kind of society would be needed for such policies to be functional? What kind of society would such policies create?
Throughout much of human history, it's probably more normal to operate by these strange policies rather than our objective-time-based policies. Despite some of our best efforts, retained in our rituals, we fortunately have not eliminated these kairos-based time markers. Whether that's in the appreciation before a meal, the holidays that haven't lost their meaning, or the opening/closing ceremony of an event, a practice in the Kairos mode persists.
To be clear, illuminating and celebrating the value of Kairos is not a denigration of Kronos. Much of civilization's benefits are downstream of our ability to relate to time as an objective, consistent phenomenon. To throw out Kronos would make as little sense as denying the effects of gravity. However, I hope to illustrate that each mode of relating to time comes with its respective literacy, each requiring the development of fluency.
Our lives can functionally tick by within a Kronos-oriented order: Graduation, Job, Marriage, Children, Retirement ... However, precisely in the moments when it matters most to us, Kairos inevitably take over, and without literacy in that subjective mode, we may miss life as it flashes by us.
After all, when we are in our final moments, it won't be the seconds ticking by, but the precious meaning anchored in that last heartbeat.