Reflections on the power of words, time

Words count, for better or worse.

Some words are weaponized to hurt others. They are best ignored. Like boomerangs, they will return to the sender who is probably craving attention anyway.

Most words are flung carelessly into the world, where they soon disappear and be forgotten by all but a very few people.

Some words are powerful because they reflect truth and wisdom that hit home.

A very few words last more than a century because they are not limited by time or space but are universal to the human condition.

Recently I came across a copy of an old college literary magazine I co-edited. I read through it for the first time in many years. The closing lines of one poem struck home: “Life is millions of timezones.” The words were written by a student who had died tragically a few months before the magazine was produced.

I’ve remembered those words for a very long time, not recalling who wrote them or why. Now I know. It was indeed a synchronicity, a “meaningful coincidence,” as the writer Carl Jung called such experiences. You know a synchronicity when you feel it, even though you may not explain it to your satisfaction.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time — what it is and how we measure it. When you’re young you may think it never ends. As you age, however, time seems to pass quickly as you realize how little is left.

There are two Greek words that unlock how time is perceived.

Chronos is clock time, how we measure it when we check it with clocks or cellphones. This kind is quantitative— the passing seconds, minutes and hours.

But there’s another kind of time that may have a deeper impact — kairos. This has to do with the quality or depth of time, not its passing moments. It’s qualitative, measured by depth not length. We are not often aware of kairos, except in looking back when we realize its impact on our lives. Then we grasp its key to unlocking the turning points

One of my earliest kairos moments came when a fourthgrade teacher encouraged me to write and then share my writing with the rest of the students in the class. I had just transferred from a private school into a public one, with all the difficult adjustments that required. She understood how I must be feeling and encouraged me not only to write but share my writing with others. I couldn’t have known it then, but I do now. Whatever form my writing took over the years, it became my lifelong purpose.

I suspect every person has kairos moments they can discover. Some moments change the course of lives for better or worse. We may not be able to change the past, but we can learn and adapt, which is our greatest human ability.

There are two ways I find to look at the meaning of time.

The first is to think about time as an abstract concept — what is it and perhaps more interestingly. What if there is no time itself? What if time itself is everywhere at the same moment — what some call eternity, in other words.

The poet William Blake posed an interesting suggestion when he wrote: “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is — infinite.” In which case, time zones themselves would not be limited to one lifetime but many, death itself being a passage from one dimension to another.

The more obvious way to talk about time is to think of it practically in terms of its quantity, having a beginning and end. One aspect of the scientific approach is to seek facts, not opinion, and to change course when reason demands.That’s why one scientist could claim, “now that I’ve solved the beginning and end of time, all I have to do is make it to Friday.”

You can’t really change the past nor the future. Your time is now and you can occupy that zone today. It’s one reason I appreciate Ben Franklin’s practical wisdom about how best to live: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”