“Home is where one starts from.  As we get older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated” (T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets).

How do we mark the different stages and eras of our lives, seeking maybe to discern some kind of overall pattern?  What categories could we use?  Is it through geography: where in the world we happen to be living at the time?  Is it by our occupation or profession: kindergarten, college years, first job, scientist, teacher, priest, mid-career success, or retirement? Is it by our chronological age: childhood, teen years, thirties, sixties?  Perhaps we simply use the external marks on a calendar: the 1960s, the 1990s, the new millennium, or whatever.

Do we, following earlier civilizations, measure time by the rulers in power: for Americans it might be the Kennedy era, the Reagan years, the Clinton administration, the Obama presidency; for the British it could be the Harold Wilson administration, the Maggie Thatcher era, the government of Tony Blair.  Maybe we mark life by our personal joys and traumas: the death of a parent, birth of a child, loss of a job.  Many tend naturally to mark their lives by the greater traumas of war or revolution: the Vietnam years, the Cold War era, the shock of 9/11 and its aftermath. 

Some of us may seek patterns or models that illuminate the stages of our lives: the Quest, the Book, the Story, the Symphony, or the Journey. Others choose various heroes, mentors, and exemplars to guide their existence: Jesus, Einstein, Kennedy, Reagan, Gandhi, Mother Teresa. At a less exalted level, borrowing the words of T. S. Eliot, perhaps I simply “measure out my life with coffee spoons” (Prufrock, 1917), characterizing my life by the technology shaping my daily routine: manual typewriters, the 1960s London Underground, Florida air-conditioning, personal computers, the Internet, smart phones, Facebook.  Any and all these categories may help each of us to discern a pattern – if pattern there be – to our lives.

I cannot deny that I have reached what some would call the retirement years, nor would I wish to.  Reflections on time, a category that has always fascinated me, come more readily into my mind now.  In the last few years, much of my academic writing has touched on matters of time and narrative, such as “The Great Gatsby & Transformations of Space-Time: Fitzgerald’s Modernist Narrative & the New Physics of Einstein.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 5 (2006), and “Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, & Memory in Norman Mailer.”  The Mailer Review 3.1 (2009).  Such reflections, I am convinced, need be neither nostalgic nor morbid. Indeed, they can be an exciting search for significance, a quest usually begun in our teens and twenties but often postponed by career and family demands until much later. Age brings a different perspective and new opportunities.  As psychologist James Hillman has written, “Aging is no accident.  It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul….  For this reason we need imaginative ideas that can grace aging and speak to it with the intelligence it deserves” (The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, 1999. xii).

The Greeks had two words for time.  One word was chronos – quantitative time, time as duration, clock or calendar time.  The other word was kairos – qualitative time, the right time, the significant time.  So, we might ask, what are the kairos occasions of life – those moments that give meaning and purpose to our existence, to the days and years measured usually in mundane chronos time?  How might we discern such moments? As we look back on the stages of our life, the seasonal cycle of winters and springs, our personal successes and failures, what gives significance to our past – and what illuminates our present?  Can we discover these kairos moments?  I think that it is these kairos moments that are being suggested by novelist & preacher Frederick Buechner when he writes, “Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is…. because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace” (Now and Then, 1983. 87). 

This is not an attempt to regress, to go back into the past: as Salman Rushdie has said, “the past is a country from which we have all emigrated (Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, 1991.12). To live in the past is both logically impossible and spiritually unhealthy.  Indeed, the dark, sinister side of both religion and politics seems to be a combination of nostalgia for a mythical Golden Age with an irrational fear for the future – and what some unnamed Other might do to us.  Listen to the current political and economic debates, as the Dems and GOP try to articulate their very different visions of America.  For all of us, as we get older, the world does seem to get “stranger,” the pattern “more complicated.” But that does not mean there is no pattern, or that we must demonize others to “conserve” some fixed pattern. Moreover, trying to find the kairos moments of our lives is a complex but worthwhile quest. It is a quest that seeks to learn from the past, but only so that we may find the joy and grace of the present instant, because “all moments are key moments” (Buechner).  It is a quest that looks confidently to the future, believing that future to be open and undetermined, for as Buechner believes “life itself is grace.”