The Most Wonderful Time

It is Christmas time, and I remember the magic of being a child  growing up on an island where Christmas meant the smell of imported apples and grapes from street vendors, carollers going door to door at night, stores decorated  with wintry scenes of the nativity and the most magical of all, life-size moving dolls in a toy-land come alive in a store window.

The holiday season, the most wonderful time of the year; for many it is and for some it is a reminder of Father Time under whose rule we either enrich or squander our lives. The Greek had two words for time,  Kronos and Kairos. Kronos refers to Time as we know it in the linear sense and is measured by clocks or chronometers and is derived from the Greek god Kronos who swallowed his children. Time in this linear sense enters each January 1 symbolized by an infant and departs on December 31 as Father Time, a long-bearded, bent-over old man. Kairos on the other hand is that quality of time with which we participate and lose track of. When we become totally absorbed,  involved with something or someone, we are in Kairos time rather than Kronos time. Whenever we are doing something that nourishes the soul, we are out of ordinary time and enter the dream time of Kairos where our sense of time becomes altered.

As a child I lived in Kairos most of the time, and especially at Christmas. Music was an important part of Christmas and the radio stations played carols, both secular and religious for more than two weeks before.  There was magic in the air with music, the smell of  baking and cooking, and the merry making of people as only a child can imagine. For me Christmas was definitely in Kairos time as I look back with fond memories. Now that I am much, much older coming up to my fifty fourth winter, Christmas is still a very special time but it has lost the excitement it had for me as a child. Do I wish to recreate that excitement if it were possible? No, as always with time, appearances can be deceiving and what made reality magical for me then will not and cannot hold the same effect for me today.

Time is relative to our consciousness and our state of mind. Time tends to move slowly when more than ninety percent of our life is ahead of us, and it seems to move more rapidly when there is not much of it left. Yet, I do not envy younger people for I have grown mellower with age, less a slave  to biochemical upheavals, certainly wiser and more peaceful. I look forward to developing that strange indefinable light that some elders portray that outshines the beauty of youth and reflects the glow of the magnificence of weathering.

Warning

by Jenny Joseph

WHEN I AM AN OLD WOMAN I SHALL WEAR PURPLE
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Taken from the book
When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
Editd by Sandra Martz
Papier Mache Press–Watsonville, California 1987