by Kerry L. Malawista
On the way to kindergarten, various accounts hold, Orville Wright passed a neighbor’s barn where he found an old, broken-down sewing machine. For the next month, rather than attend school, he and a friend hid in the barn and reassembled the machine. When his teacher told young Orville’s father that his son hadn’t been to school, he went to see how the boy was spending his time. Appreciating Orville’s curiosity and ingenuity, the father deemed it time well spent and urged him to continue.
Could we imagine parents today letting their children take similar time to explore and learn, to follow their curiosity? Could we imagine allowing ourselves this freedom? Before the pandemic, I certainly could not.
Before then, my days were like a lot of Americans’ — clocked in scheduled units of seconds, minutes and hours. Ancient Greeks named this chronos time, for the Titan god of time, Cronus.
After March 2020, we were suddenly living more in the moment, or what the Greeks called kairos time, named for Cronus’ brother Kairos. Kairos time is measured not by the passing of hours or years, but in experiences: memorable moments of awe, like when we fall in love; or moments of trauma, such as 9/11 — or, more recently, the pandemic.
Young children, by nature, live in kairos time, where one day blends into the next. Kairos time allows for openness, an expansion of boundaries. Sadly, this state doesn’t last long today.
Many older children and adolescents nowadays live in chronos time, marching to complete a never-ending list of pursuits — sports, music lessons, tutoring. Too often, those activities are performed not for what they offer in the present, but for some distant goal, such as getting into a top college.
Few kids seem to take real pleasure in these activities. Instead, they are exhausted and merely going through the motions. They have no time to linger, to experiment, and often decide that if they aren’t “talented,” they should give up. As Stanford child psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld, author of “The Over-Scheduled Child,” wrote, “By the time [teens] reach high school, they are bored and burned out.”
If we want our children to find true success, to discover a passion, we grown-ups need to be a bit more like Orville’s dad, a kairos father, who allowed his son time to make mistakes and figure things out for himself.
Just imagine what our children might create and discover if we allowed them — and ourselves — the freedom to stop time, to relish the impossible, to once again live in kairos time.
Kerry L. Malawista (www.drkerrymalawista.com), is a writer and psychoanalyst in Potomac, Md.
