It was a different era, decades before everyone had a smartphone with a camera.
Right after college, I wrote and directed my first short film.
It was predictably “arty,” shot in black and white, with a classical-music soundtrack.
Filmed over winter break, and with absolutely no budget, I cast my most willing friends, hesitating only over the female lead.
My top choice was almost perfect.
Striking-looking — after graduation she’d go on to a successful modeling career — and one of my very best friends, she was someone I knew the camera would love.
There was one problem, however — one I worried might sink the ship before it left port:
She was notoriously, habitually, perhaps even compulsively late for everything.
Last week, after sharing this month’s meditation—It’s All in the Timing (HERE)—I wrote about how the Greeks had two words for time.
Chronos is clock time — the linear sequence of moments my Apple Watch is happy to measure for me.
Kairos, however, is sacred time — the charged instant when everything aligns.
Chronos is purely mechanical, whereas Kairos is undefinable — ruled by intuition, grace, and readiness.
In this month’s Transformation Book Club we’re reading Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams which directly echoes this thought:
”In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.”
On this topic — and I swear I hadn’t calculated this — that newsletter came out on the Sunday Daylight Saving Time came into effect.
The clocks “fell back,” and we “gained” an hour of Chronos time… or did we?
There’s so much hubris inherent in setting the clocks back, in cultivating the illusion of control over time.
Especially before everything was digital, when we had to literally move the clock hands back, it was easy to pretend we had somehow created an extra hour.
Reading up on Daylight Saving Time conventions, I was amused to learn that in the 1980s the candy lobby placed candy pumpkins on senators’ desks to encourage extending DST through Halloween.
It took decades — until 2007, actually — but they eventually got their way.
Now trick-or-treaters — except in most of Arizona and in Hawaii — have one more hour of clock time to ring their neighbors’ doorbells.
This victory is offset by Congress’s recurring attempts to make DST permanent, but the proposal keeps stalling.
Whether it passes or not, I think you’ll agree the legislation has an oddly charming, poetic name:
The Sunshine Protection Act.
Opting, as is my wont, for the high-risk/high-reward scenario, I cast my glamorous but unpunctual friend in the lead.
As I did, I was reminded of Billy Wilder’s famous quip about Marilyn Monroe’s chronic lateness during the filming of Some Like It Hot.
Wilder said:
“My Aunt Minnie would always be on time and never miss a day of work in her life — but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?”
Not content to just cross my fingers and hope for the best, I strategized how I could get her to arrive on location reasonably on time.
It felt almost condescending to passionately remind her of the obvious: how important the project was to me, how central she was to it all, how much I and the others involved were counting on her.
Years later, when I was working as an intern and production assistant on countless film projects in NYC, this maxim was drilled into me:
Fifteen minutes early = on time.
On time = late.
Late = fired.
If I could just inject her with a small dose of that kind of Chronos professionalism, I knew we’d get something amazing on camera.
Nowhere has the contrast between Chronos and Kairos been clearer to me, however, than when teaching yoga classes.
On the one hand, you’re directing a practice designed to return people to a sense of the timeless, reducing physical stress so that a connection to the eternal present is restored.
And on the other hand, you’re entirely responsible for starting and ending the practice exactly on time.
This was keenly felt by so many of my private clients back in the day, when I was running around NYC teaching CEOs at 6 a.m.
Sessions had to end on the dot so they could get to a board meeting to complete a merger or fire an ad agency that wasn’t delivering.
The same was often true in packed classrooms where another class was scheduled directly after mine, often with minimal time for an easy transition.
There was even a short window when a misguided studio budgeted only five minutes between classes—completely inadequate for blissed-out students to exit as a new set of anxious New Yorkers set up their mats.
“Serenity Now” might has well have been the mantra we chanted… except alas there just wasn’t time!
Lightman writes beautifully about Kairos time:
Many are convinced that mechanical time does not exist. … They wear watches on their wrists, but only as ornaments or as courtesies to those who would give timepieces as gifts. They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires. Such people eat when they are hungry, go to their jobs at the millinery or the chemist’s whenever they wake from their sleep, make love all hours of the day. … They know that time struggles forward with a weight on its back when they are rushing an injured child to the hospital or bearing the gaze of a neighbor wronged. And they know too that time darts across the field of vision when they are eating well with friends or receiving praise or lying in the arms of a secret lover.
This fall, I’ve had some version of this conversation with three or more colleagues.
Wellness practices are more popular than ever, increasingly accepted as necessary self-care.
Oddly, though, the time we feel safe to budget for them has dramatically shrunk.
When I began teaching, my classes were almost always at least 90 minutes.
My most popular ones ran an hour and forty-five, and several were a full two hours.
Decades later, this is virtually unheard of—mostly reserved for a workshop or unusual event.
Paradoxically, everything—especially with AI—happens so much faster… and somehow this has reduced rather than enlarged the time we spend on ourselves.
I can’t help but wonder if, like that extra hour Daylight Saving Time offers, this gain is an illusion.
Here’s what Lightman says about those who live by Chronos time:
Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. … In short, the body is a machine… And if the body speaks, it is the speaking only of so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.
It’s tempting to psychoanalyze my always-late friend—and believe me, others and I have tried—but the problem for that film shoot required a solution, not a diagnosis.
Reasoning that her lateness might be in direct proportion to the importance of the moment, I did the only thing I could do:
I lied.
I told her I needed her on Friday afternoon of the weekend shoot, only intending to film with her Sunday at noon.
Worst case scenario: she’d arrive on time and I’d juggle everyone else around.
Most likely scenario: I’d start getting phone calls with extravagant apologies and excuses about arriving late an hour after her official call time.
When that happened, I feigned surprise, telling her we’d manage somehow.
In two hours, she rang to ask if we could start on Saturday morning instead.
Later—seemingly exhibiting the patience of a saint—when she begged to arrive that Saturday afternoon, I forged ahead.
Miraculously, she appeared on set two days late — I.e., exactly when I’d planned to use her.
Fortunately, as I’d hoped, as much of a disaster in Chronos time as she was, on camera she was luminous, utterly alive in the Kairos moment.
Lightman ends this chapter of Einstein’s Dreams with these words:
Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
The challenge is always navigating between these two worlds.
Offering students a deep connection to the eternal … and then ushering them out before the next class starts.
Knowing someone will create an eternal moment of magic on camera … if you can just get them to arrive on set before the film crew leaves.
Scheduling our wellness experiences as often as we can … without ruthlessly rationing the amount of time we’re willing to allocate to our soul’s self-care.
Indeed, It’s All In The Timing (Meditation HERE), provided we know that there are two worlds of time, and that we must honor each.
Tell A New Story | Transform Your Life
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