The Wisdom of the Right Timing - Daily Wisdom #64 - Taoism

Because notice what the baker is doing.

She's reading a readiness and the clock has nothing to say about it.

Nobody has ever hurried that reading by wanting the bread sooner.

You can turn the oven up.

You can stare at the bowl.

You can press every four minutes to see whether it has changed its mind.

The dough does what the dough does at the speed of yeast and warmth.

Your one real contribution is to know how to read it when it is done.

I've thought for years that this is among the most useful things a person can learn, and that almost nothing in the way we live teaches it.

We are, most of us, clock people.

We know what time it is to within a minute for the whole of our waking lives.

We know the date.

We know how old we are and how old we were supposed to be when certain things were meant to have happened and how far behind or ahead of that schedule we are running.

This knowledge is so constant that it does not register as knowledge.

It is simply the water we swim in.

The Greeks had two words for time and we have kept only one of them.

Kronos is the time of the clock in the calendar, the kind that passes at a fixed rate whether anything is happening or not.

Three o'clock is three o'clock.

Gairos is something else entirely, the right time, the right moment, the opening.

Gairos cannot be read off a dial.

can only be recognized and recognizing it is a skill like knowing by the smell when the onions have gone far enough.

Kronos knows nothing about the dough.

It can tell you the recipe said 90 minutes and it can tell you that 90 minutes have passed.

It cannot tell you whether the dough is ready because readiness is a state rather than a quantity of minutes, and a state has to be read.

Almost every anxious thought I've ever had about timing has been a Kronos thought dressed up as a Kairos one.